Rush Home Road: A Novel

Publishers Weekly

Certain novels recall fairy tales. Their heroes are banished, repeatedly challenged, until finally, foes vanquished, they make their triumphant homecoming. Though it opens in 1978 in a Chatham, Ontario, trailer park, Lansens's poignant debut is just such a novel. At its heart is Adelaide Shadd, a 70-year-old black woman who takes in five-year-old Sharla Cody when Sharla's "white trash" mother abandons her. As Addy turns Sharla from a malnourished, heedless child into a healthy, thoughtful girl, she recollects her own past. Addy grew up in Rusholme, a fictional cousin to the many Ontario communities founded by fugitive slaves brought north by the Underground Railroad. By 1908, when Addy is born, Rusholme is settled almost entirely by black farmers and is close to idyllic. But a rape and subsequent pregnancy force Addy to run away from Rusholme (she thinks of it as a command: "Rush home"), not to return for many years. Addy's life her marriage, her children, her journey to Detroit and back to Canada is the rich core of a novel also laden with history: Lansens manages to work in not only the Railroad, but also Prohibition and the Pullman porter movement. This is artfully done, but Lansens doesn't handle the novel's smaller scenes quite as well: she tends to drop narrative threads and confuse chronology. Some readers will resent the repeated plucking of their heartstrings, too, given how much Addy and Sharla suffer. Nonetheless, Lansens has created in Addy a truly noble character, not for what she suffered in the past but for what she does in the novel's present. (May 1) Forecast: This is resolutely women's fiction, as jacket copy comparisons to White Oleander and She's Come Undone underscore. Though it lacks the finesse of either of those two novels, the well-drawn portrait of Addy will capture and hold readers' attention and could make the book a popular reading group choice. Time Warner Audio; foreign rights sold in Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the U.K. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

As this first novel opens, 70-year-old Addy Shadd is living a peaceful trailer-park existence in the company of down-and-outers like Collette, who leaves her daughter with Addy and then disappears. Five-year-old Sharla is neither lovely nor lovable, and Addy's habit of solitude is hard to break, but as the two outcasts learn to care for each other, they begin healing from the abuse that they have suffered. Memories of Addy's childhood days in Rusholme, a Canadian border town settled by runaway slaves in the 1800s, come rushing back and carry the reader away. Addy recalls intimate details a small brother who died, past lovers, children now gone, and the many people who betrayed her while historical events like the Underground Railroad, the Pullman porter movement, and Prohibition frame her account and reflect some of the hardships suffered by African Americans, even in Canada. Though Addy has led a hard life, her beautiful, gentle spirit, her wise and loving way with Sharla, and an ultimate message of hope redeem the book from melancholy. A beautiful debut; recommended for all public libraries. Jennifer Baker, Seattle P.L. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A plot-driven first from Canadian Lansens strains to affirm love and redemption as an ailing slave-descendant becomes guardian of a mixed-race child. The story explores the lives of those Canadian blacks whose ancestors fled north during the American Revolution or by way of the Underground Railroad. Addy Shadd, who grew up in Rusholme, a town settled by fugitive slaves, must now survive not only racism but additional story-demanded tragedies and sorrows in a tale that makes her victim less of character than of plot. The story moves between past and present as Addy relates how the white woman Collette Depuis asks her care for her five-year-old daughter Sharla for the summer. Addy lives in a mobile home in the black section of a trailer park, and when the grubby and unkempt Sharla arrives with neither baggage nor the money Collette promised, Addy sees that the girl is of mixed race, though Sharla has no idea who her father is. Collette vanishes, and, touched by Sharla's plight, the 80-year-old Addy sets out to raise her as memories of her own childhood and past come back to her. She recalls her first love, the death of her only brother, and her rape, when she was 15, by her father's bootlegging associate. When her pregnancy began showing and she was locked out of the house, she fled to Detroit, where a black family took her in. She describes now how the baby died at birth; how she moved to nearby Chatham and married Mose, a porter; bore a daughter who died with Mose in a railway accident; and the lonely years that followed. With Addy's health now failing rapidly, she and Sharla both find redemption and closure when they finally make it back to Rusholme (as in Rush Home Road). Brimming overwith good intentions, but a relentlessly churning plot makes for an unconvincing ride.