Cassandra Darden Bell’s Mississippi Blues is a story about a woman’s quest for identity. Beverly Lamark, a best selling mystery author, lives her life just as mysterious as her books. With a secret persona and pen name she hides from her critics, fans and past. Coupled with an unavailable husband, distant siblings, and overly scheduled teenagers, Beverly can disappear from everyone’s view, including her own self. When an estranged family member summons her home to Mississippi, Beverly not only drives her and her children back to the place where she began, but to a place that where she is faced to end her shadowed life.

Mississippi Blues is an adult book with very real and timely issues: family obligation, marriage, parenthood, alcoholism, race and class, and abuse. Bell did a clever job of weaving all these issues into the novel without making it sound soap-operaish.

One of the best lines in the novel sums up Beverly’s revelation about herself: “I had carried the weight of the world around on my shoulders and years of not measuring up in my heart. I was tired of hiding…I wanted to be free.”

However, brilliant some of Bell’s passages were the book did not measure up to its full potential. The structure of the novel and development of Beverly read closer to a McMillan novel, but without a fresh perspective that I so wanted this book to provide. There are many sister-girlfriend books out with the characters who are very familiar to it viewers, but Beverly’s character missed the mark in a few places: her internal flaws weren’t evident until midway through the book, her external flaws fizzled out predictably, and her reaction to tragedy was questionable.

Bell gave away too much of Beverly’s mystery in the three flashbacks, which slowed the story down to a crawl and slowed the reader’s longing to get to know Beverly. Writing the novel in real time or alluding to these events through dialogue would have been more successful. I assumed from the jacket cover that their would be some heavy confrontations when she reached Mississippi, but they didn’t come except for one incident that was more comical than important. Bell should allow the reader to figure out the Lamark past and legacy instead of all the flashbacks, but instead created more confrontational scenes where this info would have come out.

Moreover, the novel changed styles, which will throw off the reader. The first two chapters do more telling than showing when Beverly goes on and on about her life and neighborhood. The relevance of these chapters isn’t significant enough to exist or push the story forward. In fact, the novel doesn’t begin until the third chapter. Once again here I feel as if, Bell either doesn’t believe that her reader can read between the lines or hasn’t developed a successful plot. Like her character, Beverly, who’d rather handle everything by her self, Bell should not shut out her audience in this way and let them enjoy the story that she has envisioned.

After reading this novel, I wanted more from Bell. The resolution seemed force, although I knew where she was heading. Beverly should have been the only one to solve her problems instead of minor characters, which makes me think that her conflict was not as difficult as it needed to be. As I read threw the book the second time, I still could not find a suitable conflict to carry this novel to its end. There were hints of better things to come, but it never was…better things.

Cassandra Darden Bell

I gave this book a three or average rating: (1) the author did not an interesting main characters, (2) the plot developed too slowly in the first two chapters, and (3) the resolution did not fit the conflict. Mississippi Blues was not engaging enough to hold an audience, who loves to sink into the main characters.

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Created Feb 27, 2004 at 12:54pm • Submit your own review...