The Opposite Of Everyone / Joshilyn Jackson - 3.5***

[Book Concierge]

The Opposite of Everyone – Joshilyn Jackson
Audiobook performed by the author
3.5***

Paula Vauss was born Kali Jai in Alabama. Her free-spirited young mother, Kai, was an itinerant storyteller who blended Hindu mythology with southern oral traditions to reinvent their history as they roved. But everything changed when Kai landed in prison and Paula went to foster care. Now Paula is a high-powered divorce attorney in Atlanta. While she hasn’t seen her mother in fifteen years, she’s still trying to make amends with regular checks, hoping to erase the karmic debt. Then her check is returned with a typical Kai note: “I’m going on a journey. I’m going back to my beginning; death is not the end. You will be the end. A few months later Paula discovers she was not Kai’s only child, and the race to find her mother begins.

I really like Jackson’s books. I love her quirky Southern characters, with their colorful sayings and folk wisdom. I frequently want to shake some sense into them, and more often want to sit down with them over a few glasses of wine and just get to know them better.

I found myself immersed in Paula’s present crisis pretty quickly. However improbable the many coincidences, I bought her story hook-line-and-sinker. There is more than one broken character here, but they learn to rely on one another and take steps toward healing. Jackson used flashbacks to Paula’s time in foster care very effectively.

Jackson is, herself, a talented voice artist and she narrates the audiobook. I love the voices she gave to Paul, Julia and Kai.


LINK to my review

[Peacejanz]

Great review. I like this Southern author also. peace, janz