Description:
For Angela Davis Brown, the heroine of Veronica Chambers's debut novel, When Did You Stop Loving Me, life can be divided into two parts: before and after her mother disappears on an otherwise ordinary day in 1979. Left in the care of her father, a magician who drives a Mercedes yet can't afford much more than an omelet or two a day, Angela must navigate the waters of young womanhood on her own, save the occasional appearance of her father's numerous girlfriends or her abusive Aunt Mona. Along the way, this precocious sixth-grader must grapple with the inevitable yet unanswerable need to understand how a mother could abandon her child to seek fame and fortune in Hollywood, to Angela a place a world away from Brooklyn. Chambers paints a vivid image of the political and socio-economic climate of New York in the early 1980s. The most entertaining and heartfelt scenes of this novel come when Angela describes her parents riveting admiration for Assata Shakur's escape from prison, or her father's sense of pure joy at meeting Muhammad Ali after performing at a PBS telethon to benefit the United Negro College Fund. Where the author falls short is in capturing the essence of Angela's grief; at no point does the reader feel any true investment in Angela's emotional or mental fate. Insincere lines like "My father was a magician, but Mommy was the real Houdini" do little to align the reader with this young girl's plight. Even at the end, when Chambers offers us a glimpse of Angela's adulthood, we feel no attachment to the character, no sense of triumph in her achievements and accomplishments. In fact, it is easier to identify with Teddo, Angela's proud, stubborn father, simply because he seems more genuine. His anger and grief at his wife's disappearance are palpable ("…He knelt down beside me and rested his head on my lap. His head shook and my hands trembled. I tried to still him. He cried so long that the legs of my pajamas were wet through.") while Angela's pain seems contrived and detached. When Did You Stop Loving Me is a noble first effort, but Chambers, who has achieved success as a journalist and a critic, would benefit from abandoning clichés in favor of deeper character exploration. --Gisele Toueg
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