2010 Reading #23: Cinnamon Kiss by Walter Mosley
Books 1-10.
Books 11-20.
21. And Now We are Going to Have a Party by Nicola Griffith.
22. A Black Explorer at the North Pole by Matthew Henson.
23. Cinnamon Kiss by Walter Mosley. Throughout the Easy Rawlins books there's a tension at work, between the accretion of stability which come to Easy through his (mostly) good deeds, and the need for that stability to be occasionally destroyed in order for story to happen. In this book Easy is, in some ways, falling apart more dramatically than we've ever seen him; his comfortable family situation is in jeopardy, mainly due to the illness of his adopted daughter Feather, and Easy is desperate to find the money to get her treatment. That leads him into some new (for him) territory. In many ways the entire series is about the gradually changing fortunes of a particular African American community, and that's true here. One of the ways in which it's most effective is in Mosley's chronicling of the shock that Easy still experiences when he encounters tolerance or even respect from whites, incidents which are more poignant than heartening, because of how many times he encounters hate and mistrust. At least in this book, the cops ask questions instead of just tossing him in jail. Cinnamon Kiss is enjoyable, though it doesn't match the level of Little Scarlet, and in this penultimate book of the series there are signs that Mosley is getting a bit bored with his creations; the way he shorthands Jackson Blue as "the cowardly genius," for example, and the move of so much of the action out of L.A. Even Easy's reckless behavior suggests that Mosley may be feeling that his creation is too settled, too stale. That's not my feeling, but then the way a writer lives with a character is quite different from the way a reader does.
Books 11-20.
21. And Now We are Going to Have a Party by Nicola Griffith.
22. A Black Explorer at the North Pole by Matthew Henson.
23. Cinnamon Kiss by Walter Mosley. Throughout the Easy Rawlins books there's a tension at work, between the accretion of stability which come to Easy through his (mostly) good deeds, and the need for that stability to be occasionally destroyed in order for story to happen. In this book Easy is, in some ways, falling apart more dramatically than we've ever seen him; his comfortable family situation is in jeopardy, mainly due to the illness of his adopted daughter Feather, and Easy is desperate to find the money to get her treatment. That leads him into some new (for him) territory. In many ways the entire series is about the gradually changing fortunes of a particular African American community, and that's true here. One of the ways in which it's most effective is in Mosley's chronicling of the shock that Easy still experiences when he encounters tolerance or even respect from whites, incidents which are more poignant than heartening, because of how many times he encounters hate and mistrust. At least in this book, the cops ask questions instead of just tossing him in jail. Cinnamon Kiss is enjoyable, though it doesn't match the level of Little Scarlet, and in this penultimate book of the series there are signs that Mosley is getting a bit bored with his creations; the way he shorthands Jackson Blue as "the cowardly genius," for example, and the move of so much of the action out of L.A. Even Easy's reckless behavior suggests that Mosley may be feeling that his creation is too settled, too stale. That's not my feeling, but then the way a writer lives with a character is quite different from the way a reader does.