Blanche Among the Talented Tenth by Barbara Neely
I was reading this along with three or four other books off and on, so it took me a bit to finish but that’s no commentary on the book itself. I loved this one even more than the first Blanche book because I felt like her character was even stronger here.
The case wasn’t much of a compelling mystery to me, but I loved the setting and seeing how Blanche acted on vacation. There was also a lot of great social commentary on race, color, and gender here that is still so relevant today. I had to make note of so many instances because these sentences were just screaming at me as a woman. The character of Mattie wrote a book that touched on the inequity of parenting in the early childhood years and, as a mother, that whole section had me nodding my head (page 188-190 if you have the book).
With many of these relationship and inequality arguments, I first thought, "Wow, Neely was ahead of her time," but of course that's sadly not the case. We're going backwards and it's ridiculous, but reading some of these lines did give me a strange sense of hope that we got past it once and can get past it again.
This one especially stuck out to me as I raise a son on my own and look at the men in the world around us...
"Blanche had one of those moments when her heart nearly stopped at the thought that this child she was raising was growing up to be a prime aged male. She focussed on the affectionate, good natured, individual person Malik had always been. Would puberty turn his entire personality around? She knew she didn't have much control over whether he'd develop into a man she'd like to know. No matter how often she told him to treat girls and women with fairness and respect, and about the importance of knowing and understanding his own feelings, [...] there was still a whole world of other boys and men out there telling him that being a butt-fondling troglodyte was not only OK, but all right."
Phew. For a mystery novel set during a beach vacation, there were a lot of hard truths shared here. I can't wait to read the third and fourth books. (You can find my review of the first book here.)
