Rating: 
Summary: Part II, please!
Review: Ms. Dianne has yet to disappoint me with her lovable characters. After reading "Tumbling," I just had to rush back to the bookstore and purchase this one and, again, I am left smiling and feeling all high and tipsy after getting to know these characters.Truly a great love story!
Rating:
Summary: Part II, please!
Review: Ms. Dianne has yet to disappoint me with her lovable characters. After reading "Tumbling," I just had to rush back to the bookstore and purchase this one and, again, I am left smiling and feeling all high and tipsy after getting to know these characters. Truly a great love story!
Rating: 
Summary: Dianne's got the blues
Review: I really looked forward to reading this book because I like most of Whetstone's other novels. I had this idea that the book would be warm and cozy and for the most part it was. The rhythm was very bluesy and slow, and most of all inviting. The problem was the story line with the underdeveloped subplots. For example there is the whole exploration into the twin sister's relationship, but the author leaves it wide open. She should either went all the way with what happened between Hortense and Posie or left the odd but loving connection between Verdi and Kitt as it was. Otherwise I really enjoyed the characters. I thought that they were well developed-at least as much as they needed to be without the reader losing sight of the real story. The flashbacks worked as well; they never lose the reader. Oftentimes because Verdi was so weak and didn't typify the average heroin addict it caused me to wonder if her character wasn't a little underdeveloped when it came to the drug. However I think that Whetstone does a marvelous job of showing why and how she ends up in the situation. The one thing that I thought she could have done better though is to have there be more of an immediate struggle with Johnson introducing her to the drug. Otherwise, Rowe and Penda were well done. The language sparkled as it was very high, but the author could stand some polishing on sentence structure. Otherwise I enjoyed the blues.
Rating: 
Summary: Love of a Lifetime
Review: Verdi has a comfortable life with her love, Rowe a professor at her former university and a good job, as a principal in a special needs school. She also has family her Aunt Posie, cousin/sister/best friend Kitt and her daughter Sage who at 7 has yet to speak but Verdi thinks she will with help. She loves Kitt as her sister and Sage as her daughter and Posie as her mother and spends time with them whenever she can. Rowe, who's much too cultured and dignified to hang with the likes of Kitt and her crew and believes Verdi should follow suit. Verdi loves Rowe even with all his stuffiness; after all he is the one who saved her from the pits of hell. She even feels like she owes him for all he and his estranged wife did for her. How did Verdi end up with Rowe? That's part of what Blues Dancing tells. In the early seventies, Verdi Mae, a southern bell of the middle class and daughter of a well to preacher and his wife, convinces her parents to let her go to school in Pennsylvania. She assures her parents she'll be fine and besides her mother Hortense' sister Posie and her daughter Kitt will be there to watch out for her. Verdi Mae come to Philly in the early 70's, sex, drugs and militant politics are all new and exciting to her, she gets a proper introduction to them all by the love of a lifetime, Johnson. The love she and Johnson share is total, smothering, enveloping, the end all be all to both of them. Johnson becomes son to Verdi's Aunt Posie, dear friend to Kitt. Everything is beautiful. Until Johnson's personal pain becomes too much for him to bear, so much that not even is love Verdi can save him. He finds a new lover to fill him and introduces "her" to Verdi as well. They descend to hell together with the same intensity as their love sent them to heaven, until Johnson says, no more, leaves Verdi grasping for his back and falling into the arms of Rowe. Twenty years later Johnson comes back to town. Though he's been several times before he and Verdi did not see each other at Verdi's insistence. Kitt is anxious to make them see each other this time. Verdi refuses, she doesn't want the comfort she now enjoys to be disrupted by the pain she must face by seeing the love of her life all over again. Kitt takes a page out of Posie's book of love and makes it happen. The aftermath of that meeting affects the lives of the entire family and their circle. Blues Dancing is excellent. A love story, a story of redemption, obsession, addiction and so much more. McKinney-Whetstone gives each character a voice so clear that the reader can understand them well, understand their motives, understand their struggles. This family, Verdi, her parents Hortense and Leroy and her cousin Kitt and Aunt Posie and their relationships with each other evolve, twist and turn throughout the story and this family as well as Johnson and Rowe all grow as a result of their living, interacting, suffering and loving. McKinney-Whetstone gets better and better.
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