South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Subtle, seductive novel of ’60s
The English novelist Tessa Hadley has a nuanced view of the 1960s in her brilliant, sensual, seductively plotted new novel, “Free Love.” The title is ironic since the great love affair at its center exacts a heavy toll on both of the families involved.
When the novel begins, it is 1967. Phyllis, a 40-yearold homemaker with two children in suburban London, is getting dressed for dinner. She and her husband Roger, a high-ranking civil servant in the Foreign Office, are expecting Nicholas, the
20-something son of an old friend. Phyllis dabs on L’Air du Temps, slips into a green chiffon empire-waist dress with bold red and orange stripes.
Hadley, a boomer who was born in 1956, gets all the period details completely right. But more importantly, she captures the emotional weather of a turbulent era forever linked to Haight-Ashbury, Woodstock and the mod fashions of Carnaby Street, one whose social and political repercussions are still being felt today.
Moving forward and backward in time from that fateful night, Hadley, who has written seven previous novels and three short story collections, has devised an intricate plot that unfolds with the terrible inevitability of a Greek tragedy. At the same time, it manages not to take itself too seriously in large part due to the uncanny good humor and common sense of its very English main characters.
Hadley pulls back the curtain on the naive illusions — some would say delusions — of the peaceand-love generation. But she also gives the underlying intellectual arguments their due. Still, it would be a big mistake to think of “Free Love” as a sociological tract masquerading as a novel.
Hadley has written an extraordinary story about love and transformation with a woman in early middle age at its center who is willing to sacrifice virtually everything to achieve what Hillary Clinton memorably described in her 1969 commencement speech at Wellesley as “more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living.”
This is a novel that will stay with you for a long time. — Ann Levin, Associated Press
Destiny O. Birdsong’s “Nobody’s Magic”
tells three separate stories, each centering on a Black albino woman living in Shreveport, Louisiana.
First, we meet 20-yearold Suzette, who has remained sheltered after a traumatic childhood incident. Suzette aches to break free of her overprotective father and become the independent adult she knows she can be. In her quest to do so, she finds romance in unexpected places and learns adulthood comes with some very big choices.
Then there’s Maple, whose mother and best friend in the world was murdered in a drive-by shooting. As police ask questions and Maple’s grandmother sugar coats the life her mother led, Maple fights desperately to stop the true memory of her mother from being tarnished.
And finally, there’s Agnes, who is trying to figure out the type of love she deserves, and in the process, becomes embroiled in a scandal.
The three women’s stories do not intersect per se, but together, they paint a powerful portrait of womanhood and the beautiful mess that comes along with it.
Through these beautifully flawed women, “Nobody’s Magic” becomes a celebration of sexuality, friendship, family and love.
It’s a stunning read, with each woman wholly unique in her complexity and desires. At the same time, they are all connected by their shared difference and all that has come along with it. Even more, they are connected by their unending determination to find themselves and their refusal to let anybody hold them back.