Women's Fiction, Family & Friendship - Fiction

When Did You Stop Loving Me: A Novel

Name: When Did You Stop Loving Me: A Novel
Author: Veronica Chambers
ISBN: 9780385509008

by Veronica Chambers

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Overview

When Did You Stop Loving Me is the warm and tender story of Angela, a young girl growing up in 1970s Brooklyn. One day Angela goes to school and returns home to find her mother gone. Her magician father, Teddo, left to raise Angela alone, insists on keeping Melanie's disappearance shrouded in mystery, but later Angela wryly observes, "My father was a magician, but my mother was the real Houdini."

Veronica Chambers has written a compelling story about a young girl's struggle to navigate her way through her family's web of love, loss, and magic. As Angela tries to piece her world back together and figure out why her mother has abandoned her, she's left to ponder the soul-shattering question: When did you stop loving me?

A universal story that is both finely-tuned and elegant, When Did You Stop Loving Me captures the intricacies, pleasures, contradictions, and complexities at the heart of every family. Spare and finely told, this novel will seep beneath your skin and stay with you long after the last page has been turned.

About the Author, Veronica Chambers

VERONICA CHAMBERS is the author of Having It All? and Mama’s Girl. She was formerly a culture writer for Newsweek, a staff writer at Premiere magazine, and an executive editor of Savoy magazine, as well as a frequent contributor to Glamour; O, The Oprah Magazine; the New York Times, and other publications. The daughter of a magician, she lives in Philadelphia with her husband.

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A lugubrious coming-of-ager by critic and journalist Chambers (Having It All, 2003, etc.) about a young black girl's lonely life with her father. It's 1979 and black women seem to be breaking out of jails all over New York. Eleven-year-old Angela Davis Brown has been following the case of Assata Shakur, a soldier from the Black Liberation Army who managed to escape from the upstate penitentiary where she had been sent for murdering a New Jersey State Trooper. But liberation (of a sort) strikes even closer to home when Angela wakes up one morning in Brooklyn to find that her mother Melanie has run off in the middle of the night, leaving Angela in her father Teddo's care. A magician and small-time activist, Teddo has always doted on Angela, but he also has a casual attitude toward money that drove Melanie to despair (especially since it forced her to support the family). Now left with nothing but a picture of her mother and a comb from her hair, Angela makes the best of things with Teddo as the two move from apartment to apartment and Teddo drifts from gig to gig. A dreamer with big ideas who drives a used Mercedes and studies foreign languages in his spare time, Teddo is something of a cross between Mr. Micawber and Horatio Alger, and he's able to inspire Angela to think of herself as a great deal more than a poor girl from the inner city. Eventually, and largely thanks to her father's impracticalities, Angela manages to succeed in a world that she was never allowed to look upon as alien or beyond her reach. Too sketchy for a portrait, too intricate for a sketch: Chambers gives us a good glimpse of the inner life of a talented girl making her way in the world, but she shows us too littleof the world itself to make us feel the true drama of the rise. Agent: Sandra Dijkstra/Sandra Dijkstra Agency