An unforeseen diagnosis sends Ava Johnson into a tailspin and the high-powered lifestyle she’s built for herself in Atlanta falls apart. She decides: it is time to move. Setting her heart on San Francisco, she’s makes a pit-stop in her old home town, sleepy Idlewild, Michigan.

An alluring all-Black resort town in its heyday, Idlewild lost its summer residents to integration. In the ensuing unemployment and poverty, Idlewild has succumbed to so-called “big-city” problems like drugs and violence.

Ava rejoins her sister Joyce, who settled in Idlewild. Joyce is a storehouse of nonstop energy that she devotes to the community through her group, The Sewing Circus, offering support and education for the teenaged mothers of her church.

What begins as a stopover for Ava quickly grows into something much more. Before long she is intimately drawn into Joyce’s work. As a string of violent events builds to a crescendo, the mystery of who’s behind them and their strange connection to the pastor and his wife culminate in a climax that had me holding my breath and turning pages as fast as my fingers could fly.

Interweaved through all this drama, Ava re-meets an old friend, Eddie Jefferson, and the sparks fly, just when she’s given up on love. But Eddie has some dark secrets of his own…
 
I love this book. Pearl Cleage so skillfully weaves suspense and romance, street-wisdom and compassion, humor and poignancy in this book, I read like it was going out of style. I could hear her playwriting experience in the sharp dialogue and characters’ thoughts. What made this book for me were the characters. We get to grow with Ava as the book progresses. Joyce’s and Eddie’s characters have a complexity and depth that make them real. My only criticisms of this book are that the “bad guys” don’t have nearly the depth of the other characters, making them proportionately less believable, and the ending leaves a few loose ends… In the big picture, these were minor flaws

Charisse Sisou