Overview
Las Vegas, 1994. The Prices are introduced by Viola, the family's matriarch: Her husband, Cecil, and their four adult kids, scattered across the country, seem determined to send her to her grave, or at least to the hospital with worrying. Paris is divorced, mother to a nearly seventeen-year-old son, a successful businesswoman and the one who always comes to everybody's rescue. Lewis is the scapegoat - his troubles keep landing him in jail, which only seems to confirm what his family thinks he is. Out in Chicago, Charlotte knows she's gotten the short en of the stick, has "nothing in common except blood" with her parents and siblings and would just as soon divorce them all. Janelle, the baby of the family, is not only on the defensive about the course of her own life and the man she's recently married but she's also facing a new crisis with her teenage daughter that threatens more than she's willing to admit.With her hallmark exuberance and a cast of characters so sassy, resilient, and full of life that they breathe, dream, and shout right off the page, Terry McMillan has given a tour-de-force novel of family. Healing, and redemption.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewEqual parts cultural phenom, literary trailblazer, and all-around righteous sister, Terry McMillan inspires hope and devotion, her novels -- including Waiting to Exhale, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, and Disappearing Acts -- celebrated for their affirming vision of empowered women. A Day Late and a Dollar Short delivers this and more, exploring the Price family: matriarch Viola; daughters Paris, Janelle, and Charlotte; husband Cecil; and son Lewis. And as never before, McMillan's men give as good as they take, equal to their feisty, fast-talking feminine relations. The layered characterizations -- revealed through first-person chapters told individually by each family member -- imbue the novel with a rare dimensionality, as the same people and events are viewed from multiple perspectives. And more than the title allows, the Price family in McMillan's A Day Late and a Dollar Short discovers that forgiveness can offer powerful healing, even from beyond the grave.
Any man with a whiff of sense knows better than to express a critical opinion about the work of Terry McMillan in gender-mixed company. McMillan's legion of female readers fiercely protect her, unafraid to speak at length and at the drop of a hat about her gifts and her relevance. Male validation is unnecessary.
Sometimes that level of loyalty gets delightfully loud. Attending an Atlanta screening of the film version of Waiting to Exhale several years ago, I witnessed the largely female audience actively participating, peppering the on-screen dialogue with "Tell the truth!" and "Amen, sister!" Sunday morning church services blended with Friday night cineplex previews. At McMillan's bookstore appearances, too, women have been known to testify during the question-and-answer periods, joyously, tearfully remembering the discovery in McMillan's novels of women like themselves: strong and vulnerable, delicate and determined, flawed and fabulous.
In A Day Late and a Dollar Short, the four Price women are complicated and conflicted, seemingly unable to figure out ways to express their love for one another or the men in their lives without bumping up against family ghosts and assorted personal baggage. Intimacy remains illusory. Echoing the four female voices of Waiting to Exhale, the Price women face some familiar challenges, including health, finances, children, spouses, infidelity, and career options. But a departure awaits, as McMillan flexes her fictional muscles, including several strong male characters who boldly claim equal time.
Although McMillan has employed a male voice before in Disappearing Acts, where Franklin alternated with Zora to tell the tale, it always felt more like a woman's story. In A Day Late and a Dollar Short, family patriarch Cecil Price and his only son, Lewis, are equal to the task of getting a word in edgewise among all those fast-talking women. The male characters are as fully realized, as complex and as capable of growth and transformation, as any of the women.
A Day Late and a Dollar Short is, ultimately, about those transformations. It's about the healing power of family forgiveness, even when it comes to the wounds that go back to when Mama didn't love you enough or Daddy wasn't paying attention or your little sister got to ride in the front seat while you had to squeeze in the back. In McMillan's novel, those old hurts are batted back and forth among the characters so often that sometimes it is a struggle to see the whole picture and, therefore, the whole truth. In this, the reader's journey is similar to the one taken by the Price family itself, requiring us, like them, to take one step back for every two steps forward, but promising great rewards if we just commit.
When Viola's family gathers on Thanksgiving to share the letters she has written each one, absolving them of all crimes, real or imagined, the book signals a transition for McMillan, as well as for her characters. In A Day Late and a Dollar Short, she seems to have decided that forgiveness is preferable to harsher judgments, especially in matters of the heart. Where this kinder, gentler worldview will ultimately lead McMillan's female characters is still a mystery. For the moment, it seems enough that they can simply forgive, forget, and, finally, exhale.
From The Critics
Undoubtedly, McMillan's finest novel to date...a delicious family saga...McMillan has an uncanny ability to render family conflict with both humor and compassion...a life-affirming read...a triumph.Chicago Tribune
By the last pages you're weeping. You're laughing. You're hooked. It's oh-so-good.Essence
A valentine to the power and beauty of black families and the indestructible bond that holds us together.Los Angeles Times
Undoubtedly, McMillan's finest novel to date...a delicious family saga...McMillan has an uncanny ability to render family conflict with both humor and compassion...a life-affirming read...a triumph.New York Newsday
[A] slam dunk of a novel...this book is a gift.Newsday
...McMillian's assured and empathetic writing brings them so strongly to life...leap off the page...This book is a gift.People
Touching and funny.Toronto Star
Nobody does it better.Village Voice
McMillan's best book yet. She has a true comic gift.From The Critics
McMillan's new novel is her first since the 1996 hit How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Here McMillan introduces a bevy of lively characters, including Viola Price, her estranged husband, Cecil, and their four adult children, Paris, Janelle, Charlotte and Lewis. In their own words, each family member provides a glimpse into his or her life and secrets, as well as the ways they see each other. The book starts out slowly, with an endless series of character sketches, but goes on to successfully weave the characters together into a picture of a fully formed family. The Prices struggle through their fair share of problems: Gambling, pill-popping and sister-envy are but a few. Yet their love for each other takes them through the toughest of times. In the hands of McMillan, the master of edgy, ensemble storytelling, this book, like Disappearing Acts and Waiting to Exhale, has drama and snap. Every time I put it down, I wanted to know what would happen next.—Andrea King Collier
Publishers Weekly -
Viola Price is the truth-telling, trash-talking Las Vegas matriarch at the center of McMillan's eagerly awaited new novel. As the book begins, Viola is in the hospital recovering from a devastating asthma attack, and she's decided to turn her life around, even if it means causing her large, unruly clan a little discomfort. Lewis, Viola's only son, is a drifter, handicapped both by his genius IQ and his alcoholism. Janelle, the youngest child, is perpetually searching for the perfect career, while ignoring signs that her 12-year-old daughter is in trouble. Viola's relationship with her perpetually angry middle daughter, Charlotte, is so volatile that Charlotte periodically hangs up in the middle of phone conversations, while Paris, Viola's eldest, appears to be brilliantly successful, but is actually desperately lonely and has developed a dependency on pills to maintain her superwoman act. To add to the confusion, Cecil, Viola's husband of 40 years, has moved in with his girlfriend, Brenda, a welfare mother pregnant with a child that may or may not be his. The story of how the family puts it back together is told from the perspective of all six main characters, and McMillan moves easily and skillfully from voice to voice. The characters are not entirely sympatheticDlike Viola, McMillan (How Stella Got Her Groove Back) doesn't sugarcoat the truthDbut knowing their weaknesses does make their acts of courage all the more meaningful. This is a moving and true depiction of an American family, driven apart and bound together by the real stuff of life: love, loss, grief, infidelity, addiction, pregnancy, forgiveness and the IRS. (Jan. 15) Forecast: Gutsier and less glitzy than How Stella Got Her Groove Back, McMillan's latest has perhaps the broadest appeal of any of her novels. A major national advertising campaign, national publicity, a TV and radio satellite tour and a 12-city author tour will get the word out and drive the book toward the top of the charts. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.Ruth Coughlin
Viola's feisty yet compassionate voice is the strongest here; she spits out her opinions about everything from the untrustworthiness of men to the allure and durability of Thomasville furniture. Five years after the publication of McMillan's last novel, it is good to see her back in top form. Her breezy yet detailed portrait of this wayward family is both moving and memorable. New York Times Book ReviewTate
McMillan seems to have stepped up her game, her literary funksmanship, with this book. Funny, finely crafted, profound, and pathos-ridden when it needs to be—breezy when it does not—A Day Late has my unlettered vote as her best book yet... is contemporary African American naturalism at its best.—Village Voice