I couldn't give The Professor's Daughter five stars though I so wanted to, especially for its author's incites and masterful writing (see quotes below). Somewhere around half-way through, though, I lost some interest. Then close to the end I engaged again, just to find out if there was some kind of a real ending. Why?
Since finishing the story, I have read an interview with Raboteau. She says she's not particularly plot driven. Rather she's more interested in racial and religious backgrounds, tensions, triumphs and tragedies, especially among those of mixed racial backgrounds. There's nothing wrong or "bad" about her preferred interests. We could use more like her in today's conflict-ridden, outright nasty "civil" discourse. But I guess her lack of a focused plot line is why I slowed down; she didn't know quite how the tale would end herself. For instance, she included a brief synopsis of how bad a drunken, grown-up Tiny would feel years later about the time he and the other boys tried to smoke BJ out of the closet at prep school. I think that having already strongly portrayed the characteristics of Tiny, Ned and the other boys at St. Ignatius prep, Raboteau was not obliged to insert this little tale into the middle (p. 146) of the greater story. It lead no where in particular other than to reaffirm Tiny's weak, follow-the-crowd-no-matter-what personality. She also began to add multitudes of new characters, not all of whose names seemed that critical. Retelling the long African Tale of "The Origins of Little Willa" (p. 167) also failed to add much to my understanding of the atrocities resulting from racism in Africa. Finally Raboteau started to turn a bit sloppy with her formerly exquisite language and syntax. For example the sentence, "The skirt of her polyester dress had static-clung to her stockings,..." (p 244) was strange in construction; turning "static-cling" into a verb form seemed a bit far-fetched and again slowed the mostly lyrical pace of the book. Perhaps this meandering is indicative of many first-time novelists. It can't be easy to tie up a long tale, encompassing three generations and told from several points of view, into a perfectly satisfying ending.
In summary, then, I certainly hope that Raboteau continues to write novels, but that she concentrate a bit more on plot development, realizing its importance as a driver for the reader. At the same I anticipate that she will carry on embracing the lyricism of her written word and including her deep understanding of the history and experience of the American racial/religious divide.
A few great quotes:
I remain a question mark. When people ask me what I am, which is not an everyday question, but one I get asked every day, I want to tell them about Bernie [narrator's (Emma's) brother]. I don't, of course. I just tell them what color my parents are, which is to say, my father is black and my mother is white...somehow in the pooling pudding of genes, our mom's side won out in the category of hair. And this is really what makes you black in the eyes of others. The Professor's Daughter p 2
My father is black and my mother is white and my brother is a vegetable. When we were small the vegetable told me stories. The stories began when we moved from the West Coast to the East Coast. The Professor's Daughter p 3
The highway is winding behind us. I am six and my brother is seven. We are driving cross-country from Oakland where kids like us are a dime a dozen, double-dutching on asphalt and break dancing on cardboard dance floors under helicopter skies. The Professor's Daughter p 4