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HOW STELLA GOT HER GROOVE BACK
Author: "McMillan, Terry
Review Date: APRIL 15, 1996
Publisher:Viking
Pages: 352 pp.
Price (hardback): $23.95
Publication Date: 05/01/1996
ISBN: 0-670-86990-2
Category: FICTION
McMillan (Waiting to Exhale, 1992, etc.) takes it easy with this tossed-together tale of a 42-year-old black female professional who falls for a young Jamaican cook. The love story provides a suitable frame for the author's trademark charm and credible sense of black middle-class values, but sloppy prose and a single, rather solitary protagonist fail to give readers the synergistic magic of the earlier book. Stella Payne has it all--a charming 11-year-old son, a beautiful house north of San Francisco, and a high-paying job as a financial systems analyst. So why isn't she happy? For three years--since her divorce from the man who talked her into abandoning her art-furniture business in favor of a more lucrative career--Stella has had no serious love interest in her life. When her son, Quincy, flies off to visit his father, workaholic Stella spontaneously signs up for nine days alone at a resort in Jamaica. The last thing she expects to find is an unquenchable passion for a 20-year-old chef's assistant; and on her return home, she discovers that she can't quite relegate her happy thoughts of Winston Shakespeare to the vacation-fling portion of her memory bank. So Stella arranges for Winston to visit her in San Francisco--where the easygoing boy charms her son, her sisters, and her friends, and even talks Stella into dumping the stock exchange and returning to her artist's life. Despite Stella's repeated protests that Winston must be out of his mind, there are few serious barriers to this May-October love affair. Long, run-on, train-of-consciousness sentences give the impression less of the characters' mental states than of a hastily written novel. One hopes McMillan will follow her heroine's example and slow down a little on her next book.
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 | Talk Like a Man: Robert B. Parker Tribute
January 15, 2010 - I still remember the first time I heard Spenser's voice ring out in the opening chapter of The Godwulf Manuscript (1973), as he razzes the college president who's trying to hire him. What's this guy's problem? I thought. Why does he have such an attitude? The attitude, I soon learned, had deep roots...Part of it was a temperamental similarity to Spenser's creator, Robert B. Parker, who died on Jan. 18th at age 77.
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