Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

Rating:
Summary: I PREDICT...These 2 Women
Review: Z.Z. PACKER VS. KOLA BOOF.

TWO NEW BLACK WOMAN AUTHORS, TWO SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS.

AND...THEIR "DUET" APPEARANCE IN YET A THIRD SHORT STORY COLLECTION.

I've read two masterful short story collections in the last 7 days, both by new up and coming Black Women writers (Z.Z. Packer's awesomely nuanced "Drinking Coffee" and Kola Boof's disturbing "Long Train to the Redeeming Sin"), and I find it downright painful to say which one I like better. Both collections, to me, are masterpieces.

Why am I mentioning these two very different women in the same breath? KEEP READING and you'll find out!!

This sensible rainy day collection by Z.Z. Packer is much more publicized by the mainstream media and known to the public, but I can't say that all the praise and adulation isn't well deserved. Z.Z. Packer writes better than Kola Boof, I think, in that she's more focused, professionally trained and clinical. Each story in "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere" is really rendered as a slice of real life, the author's personal views seeming to be cleansed from the canvas so that the nuances and absurdities of life can seep through, very suttle yet very powerfully. It's amazing how skillful and calm Packer's writing is considering the ferocity of the inner themes, but she pulls it off with such a masterful ease that you almost feel that you're reading a hybrid of Hemingway and Alice Walker with a little Percival Everett (whom I love!) mixed in.

My favorite story, the one that sticks with me, is the one about the little prejudiced black girls. It's a hoot!

"Drinking Coffee Elsewhere" is a calm, subdued but very powerfully written debut and I look forward to her upcoming novel about Buffalo Soldiers.

As for Kola Boof's "Long Train to the Redeeming Sin", all I can say is WOW. It's hard to describe the book because the author is so non-author-like. Unlike Packer, Kola Boof is from Africa and was never formally educated. Kola Boof's style is totally unorthodox and preachy in a sense, but then so earthy and truthful and emotional in another sense that you simply cannot look away from her creations. She writes like a singer. Her collection is powerful like Packer's "Drinking Coffee"--but ultimately more passionate and shocking. These stories of African women facing issues like skin color prejudice, hair anxiety and genital mutilation and rape by white colonizers is handled so sweeping and matter-of-factly and with such authority that of the two collections, I have to give Kola Boof's the nod for being more unforgettable.

THE REAL TREAT...is that both these two black women writers appear together in the very hip, witty short story collection "POLITICALLY INSPIRED" (edited by Stephen Elliot), showcasing a two very different stories, that somehow (to me), resonate with the same level of consciousness and sadness about one theme--"death and loss".

Kola Boof's story in "POLITICALLY INSPIRED" is the more showy and adventurous one, and actually, it flat out satisfied me more than Packer's contribution, but the voices of the two writers continues to intrigue me as they are both young black women, new on the scene and much talked about. It will be fun to see which of these girls--Z.Z. Packer, Suzan Lori Parks, Kola Boof or ZADIE SMITH takes over the mantle from Alice Walker and Toni Morrison.

If you haven't guessed yet, I'm PREDICTING that the classy, somber Z.Z. Packer and the provocative, wild and mysterious Kola Boof are the clear and present frontrunners. They're both AWESOME and unique, but also seem to write from some driven inner voice, politically, sexually and racially, much like Morrison and Walker once did.

Anyone who reads "Drinking Coffee" and "Long Train to the Redeeming Sin" will see what I mean.











Rating:
Summary: Perfect Powerful Prose
Review: Z.Z.Packer's much-anticipated short story collection is a celebration of prose perfection. Her critically acclaimed short stories are action packed slices of American, edgy and provocative portrayals of life. Her stories project real people having real issues. "Brownies" is about a Brownie troop of Black girls who are confronted by a white girl troop. "Our Lady of Peace" explores the deterioration of the public school system, while six other stories haunt your soul. I love that!
Her command of the English language is poured into every paragraph. Reading her work gives me more respect for the writing craft. It is a skillful art form that requires study and thought, which proves my point that not anyone who can put pen to paper deserves to be called a writer. Packer's works make that fact evident and makes me want to work on my own re-writes.
If you want to delve into a richly, intoxicating book, then this one is for you. Your five senses will be moved by each story and your intellect, intuition and heart will be challenged. My favorite passage comes from "Our Lady of Peace":
But any place was better than Odair County, Kentucky. She'd hated how everyone their oozed out their words, and how humble everyone pretended to be...Her [Lynnea] family was one of four black families in the county, and if another white person ever told her how "interesting" her hair was, or how good it was that she didn't have to worry about getting a tan- ha ha- or asked her opinion anytime Jesse Jackson farted, she'd strangle them.
I gave this collection 5 pens because it is brilliant without any flaws, worthy of anyone's library. This book is a classic of which I'm sure my three-year-old daughter will have to read in English literature some day. Wonderful!

Dee Y. Stewart
R.E.A.L. Reviewers


Rating:
Summary: A Truly Stunning Debut for ZZ Packer
Review: ZZ Packer has channeled the voice of the outsider. Nothing particularly revelatory happens in her new collection of eight short stories, at least nothing that significant on the face of things. A Brownie troop nearly incites a brawl. A freshman Yale loner with a "suicide single" connects with a pudgy white girl. An ex-patriot American starves in Japan. Packer's very real, fairly troubled protagonists share the feeling of being out of place in their current environs, with dreams of something perhaps bigger and definitely better. None are anything out of the ordinary. And yet, each of the stories in DRINKING COFFEE ELSEWHERE, chronicling bits and pieces of the African-American experience, is extraordinary.

The standout in this group is the title story, "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere." The title refers to the main character's coping strategy, namely pretending to be somewhere else when the pain she is enduring becomes too much. After Dina makes the dean's dubious watch list for naming a revolver as the inanimate object she'd most like to transform into during Yale freshman orientation, she becomes a sort of self-made outcast. When she meets Heather, a doughy fellow frosh who can't stop crying over a bad night with a new guy, Dina gradually learns to let her in and wonders if their relationship is something more than just platonic. Like all of Packer's stories, "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere" offers no hard and fast finale. Dina may or may not be gay. She may or may not be using her outcast status at Yale as a way of coping with her mother's death. She may or may not be the same protagonist, again a black loner named Dina, who alienates her roommates by eating the last slice of grapefruit in the later story, "Geese."

Another standout story in this collection is "Speaking in Tongues," in which a Sunday school-ish 14-year-old runs away to Atlanta and is taken in by a [sex abuser.] It would be very easy for the characters in this story to be portrayed as caricatures --- the naïve innocent, the man who takes advantage of her, the hardened street girl saving for a way out who ultimately rescues the young heroine. But Packer's nuanced portrayals paint each character a shade of gray. She is an author who presents the facts as she sees them and lets her audience draw their own conclusions, an all-too-lost art in a John Grisham world. Packer's characters are often, though not always, very smart. Many are struggling to rise above their circumstances, yet they feel trapped by things beyond their control: their parents, their faith and their jobs.

Several of Packer's stories examine religion with a somewhat jaded eye. In "Every Tongue Shall Confess" a lecherous preacher molests a fervent congregant. At the end, the man she hopes to save reveals himself to perhaps be her savoir. Again, Packer lets the readers decide. Most of these stories had already appeared in various magazines and short story collections before being gathered for DRINKING COFFEE ELSEWHERE. It's truly a stunning debut. Here's hoping that Packer's next work, be it more stories or a novel, comes quickly.

--- Reviewed by Toni Fitzgerald

Rating:
Summary: Smart People Surrounded by Fools=Great Stories
Review: ZZ Packer's masterful stories deal with the crisis of belonging that many African-Americans face because, as individuals, people of all races, including their own, have monolithic expectations of them, which their individuality defies. Packer's characters break out of any kind of preconceived molds and faced with Groupthink, pressures to conform, and the patronization and condescension of liberal whites, these characters become infuriated by the stupidity that surrounds them. The style of the stories is intensely realistic, often satirical, bitter, nihilistic. At the same time Packer brings a deep humanity, complexity, and sympathy to her cast of misfits, all who search for belonging and never find it.

In "Brownies" African-American girls stir a brouhaha with a dubious charge of having heard a racial epithet uttered by the white Brownies. The story in many ways is a funny and disturbing exploration of Groupthink whereby the black Brownies never really heard the epithet but get caught up in the self-righteousness and mission of their revenge. In "Every Tongue Shall Confess" a cross-eyed, homely lady, Clareese, plays by the rules, reads her Bible, and works hard as a nurse, only to be exploited by her church deacons who use her as a door mat. We cringe as we watch Clareese sink deeper and deeper into loneliness. In "Our Lady of Peace" a young woman takes on teaching in a public school in order to change nihilistic, lawless high school children, but in a reversal, the children make her a nihilistic misanthropist. The teacher Lynnea Davis not only begins to despise the children, but the teachers she works with. In the "Ant of the Self" a precocious teenage boy named Spurgeon must face the dilemmas of having an alcoholic bully of a father who drags his son to the Million-Man March where Spurgeon, the innocent party, is berated by rhetorically-inflamed black men to respect and love and appreciate his father for taking him to such a great event when in fact his hustler of a father simply took him to the march in order to sell a bunch of stolen exotic birds. In "Speaking in Tongues" a young girl runs away from home where her overly pious aunt subjects her to the abuses of a dysfunctional, abusive church. However, running away to Atlanta to find her mother, the young girl discovers that the secular world-full of pimps, hustlers, and libertines-offers no refuge.

For all the diversity of these stories, we can see Packer's general themes-her animosity against Groupthink, her loathing of convenient stereotypical thinking, her objection to the use of religion and false piety in order to bully others, her disdain for the manner in which clichés offer people false solutions and self-aggrandizement. Packer is a major writer tackling major themes and I am eagerly awaiting her next publication.