Jessie and Jesus and Cousin Claire - Hardcover

Andrews, Raymond

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1561450324 ISBN 13: 9781561450329

Publisher: Peachtree, 1991

Synopsis

Jessie and Claire make their unique mark on the rural South.
Look out! Here come Jessie Mitchell Blackshear and her equally dangerous double, Cousin Claire. Sexy, smart, and sassy, these powerful Black women survive and thrive in the male-dominated world of the rural South. Thoroughly different and equally dedicated to getting their way, Jessie and Claire will entertain and amaze you—if they don't swallow you whole!
In these two hilarious and hair-raising novellas, Raymond Andrews has painted portraits of two very different black women whose means and modes of manipulation are mirror-opposites of each other, but whose motivations are frighteningly similar. The results—and their impact on those around them—are equally profound.
Welcome to the darkly comic world of Jessie & Jesus & Cousin Claire, vividly presented in the rambunctious and rollicking prose of a master storyteller and inspired seer into human nature. Published shortly before Andrews's death in 1991, Jessie & Jesus & Cousin Claire won a 1992 American Book Award.

About this title

About the Author

Raymond Andrews in the author of a number of books, including The Last Radio Baby and Jessie and Jesus and Cousin Claire. He passed away in 1991.

Benny Andrews illustrated all of his brother Raymond's books. Educated at the Art Institute of Chicago, he was an internationally-known artist whose works hang in major museums around the country, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirschorn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum of Harlem, and the Museum of African Art. He passed away in 2006.

From the Back Cover

Take your children on a trip with the Curious Kids, using more than 600 pictures to learn about travel. The first steps of reading become an adventure as young readers connect drawings with the words that name them.

Reviews

Three black women (two viragoes and a doe-eyed wanderer) wreak havoc on the African American citizens of Appalachee, Ga., in this rollicking two-part novel by the author of the saucy Baby Sweet's. Shrewd businesswoman Jessie Mitchell seduces and discards her paramours without a care until the girlfriend--Jesus by name--of one conquest inserts herself in Jessie's life. Jesus, baby in tow, roams Jessie's dairy farm, exacts payment for the loss of her lover and introduces the word "conscience" into Jessie's vocabulary. Cousin Claire, a voluptuous nurse from across the tracks, doesn't have time for moral fiber. Her get-rich scheme via an elderly widower's bed hits a snag when the old man dies and the will is read. Although resourceful Claire then manages to make her deceased lover's son very happy, she soon learns that the competition is just as slick as she is. Replete with racy trysts, colorful characters and cheeky humor, Andrews's book entertains and educates on the follies of human nature.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Two strong-willed, manipulative women dominate the stage in this latest installment of high-jinks and misadventures among black rural Georgians (Baby Sweets, 1983, etc.) by the first winner of the James Baldwin Prize for Fiction--a rambunctious collection of down-home tales that never quite adds up to an integrated whole. The only daughter (or so she believes) of a hard-working dairy farmer and his invalid wife, Jessie Mitchell--handsome, black, and phenomenally determined--has known since birth exactly what she wants in life and how to grab it. Getting off to an early start by ``accidentally'' drowning her despised younger brother, Sidney Junior, Jessie stomps toward young adulthood determined to win everything Sidney had coming to him--the farm, her parents' love, and a good-looking family of her own--even if it means the equally ``accidental'' deaths of Jessie's luckless first lover, Candy Man, and her handsome husband, Amos Blackshear V, both of whom just happen to stumble into the human tornado's way. On the brink of ultimate triumph, Jessie discovers that those she'd dominated best and longest have betrayed her in ways even she never could have imagined. Outraged, she roars off in her shiny new car, only to end up crashed and drowned herself in a nearby creek--her story abruptly ending halfway through this southern yarn. Cut to the more genteel Lester house in town, where sweet-faced Cousin Claire has just appeared on the doorstep intent on wreaking havoc in her own unique, honey-dripping way--wending a path, black-widow-style, through an entire family in her attempt to claim title to their house. Claire's approach to manipulation differs radically from Jessie's, but the results are the same: scandal and destruction at its most richly southern, and a good time had by all. Wildly anecdotal--like listening to a country-store denizen on speed--with colorful characters and a roller-coaster plotline vying in cheerful anarchy. Thirteen b&w line drawings by Benny Andrews (the author's brother) accompany the text. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Peachtree
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1561450324
• ISBN 13: 9781561450329
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Andrews Benny
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 202