The Light Always Breaks
In this inspirational romance, Jackson-Brown creates a fascinating dilemma for her heroine: what’s a super-competent, Christian, Black restauranteur to do when the only man she ever loved is white, and it’s 1948, when miscegenation laws prohibit their marriage? Brown received praise for her previous novel, When Stars Rained Down, which also focused on an ambitious Black woman’s struggles in the post-Reconstruction South; this latest outing reflects the current national conversation about the failure of the legal system to grapple with America’s troubling legacies.
Eva Cardon, the child of a Black Creole mother and a rich white father, is proud of her heritage, which she has translated into her management of Washington, DC’s hottest new restaurant, Chez Geneviève. The restaurant attracts the best and brightest of the post-World War II Black artists and social activists, including Adam Clayton Powell, Mary McLeod Bethune, Paul Robeson, and many others. But when Eva falls for Senator Courtland Kingsley, a junior U.S. senator from a wealthy Dixiecrat family, at the same time she hosts Civil Rights activist meetings at her restaurant, she comes under attack from racist police and politicians, and her dream of success, in spite of the deck being stacked against Black businesswomen, is threatened.
This would be a riveting story except for the frustrating quality of Jackson-Brown’s prose, which is stilted, wordy, and repetitive, despite the originality of her characters and plot. Far too many historical facts are explained at length, historical characters are identified by the same phrase over and over again, and in general, the author opts for explaining rather than dramatizing Eva’s inner and external conflicts. This may be a case where more careful editing was needed, and this novel, which illuminates an important time and place in Black history, is sadly almost unreadable.
