Double Stitch

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This brilliant and stirring collection of prose, poetry and scholarship by 47 black women writers explores the depth of the bond between black mothers and daughters and demonstrates how this relationship has molded black women and families. A revealing work, its spirit of self-celebration tempered by often painful candor, the book is free of matriarchal and feminist ideology. While focusing on mothers and daughters, the collection also describes black women as sisters, friends, victims, workers and lovers. The work of Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Paule Marshal and Sonia Sanchez is included. The editors are members of the editorial collective of SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women. (Nov.)

Library Journal

Black mother-daughter relationships are explored through the varying perspectives, traditions, and experiences expressed in this anthology of 47 personal and scholarly essays, stories, and poems written by black women. Among the contributors are well-known writers and scholars such as Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Gloria T. Hull, Bell Hooks, Sonia Sanchez, and Patricia Hill Collins, who reveal the complexity and diversity as well as the commonality of bonding found in the femaleness and blackness of these relationships. A quilt metaphor forming the organizational scheme for the collection emphasizes differing developmental stages of these bonds. Put together by the editors of SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women , in which many of the works first appeared, this anthology is highly recommended for its presentation of a broad spectrum of black mother-daughter relationships that will engage the attention and interest of both scholars and general readers.-- Jeris Cassel, Rutgers Univ. Libs., New Brunswick, N.J.

School Library Journal

. LC number unavailable. A-- Mother-daughter connections are explored by 48 black women writers in this volume of poetry, fiction, personal narratives, and essays. Framed within the quilt-making metaphor, these rich and varied voices strike equally rich and varied themes surrounding this relationship--the personal and cultural meanings, conflicts, nurturing, and the way they face separation and death. Newer writers join famous ones, such as Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Belle Hanks, and June Jordan. The strengths of Double Stitch lie in its concentrated focus and its honesty; the writings probe deeply, exposing both the tenderness and the turbulence in concrete ways. While the strong church-going matriarch is present, so is the less-than-perfect mother in conflict with the less-than-respectful daughter. Some mothers fail, escaping into alcoholism and other destructions. The selections have been organized to show that just as the quilting process can run in several directions at once, so can the mother-daughter relationship. Because this focus produces a driving intensity, YAs will prefer it to Mary Washington's more diffuse Memory of Kin: Stories about Family by Black Writers (Doubleday, 1991), which touches on all kinds of family units. Whatever their ethnic origins, they will find much to consider here.--Margaret C. Nolan, W. T. Woodson High School, Fairfax, VA