From Amazon
Soul Kiss, an eloquent first novel from well-known African-American playwright Shay Youngblood, opens as seven-year-old Mariah Kim Santos is unceremoniously and suddenly deposited by her mother to live with two maiden aunts in rural Georgia. The only parting words from Mama are "Mama loves you." Mariah is then directed to wait for her mother's return. Years pass and Mariah's mother doesn't come back. Mariah forms a unique and loving relationship with her surrogate parents. As she passes into womanhood, Mariah feels emotionally complete only with other women; when she learns for the first time about the existence of her father, the central questions of her familial and sexual identities rise, and she seeks out that father, a painter living in Los Angeles. There she makes the disorienting simultaneous discovery of new areas of explosive erotic passion and family love.
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From Library Journal
Playwright and short-story writer Youngblood's first novel, a moody, lyrical coming-of-age drama, wades through words usually left unspoken, naming the poetry of abandonment and poking at the taboo of sex stirring within the parent-child relationship. At age seven, Mariah Kin Santos suddenly loses her quasi-idyllic childhood in Manhattan, Kansas, when her subtly despairing, drug-addicted mother takes her by train to rural Georgia and leaves her with two singular maiden aunts, promising to return. Mariah waits, subsisting on remembered words and keening, physically and emotionally, for reunion. After some years, she learns of the existence of her artist father and journeys to Los Angeles in an impassioned attempt to locate family and wholeness. Instead, she meets an ambivalent fate. Mariah returns to Georgia with a smaller family circle, larger and more sorrowful experience, and the hope?perhaps?of peace. Occasionally intense, but too sensitive and honest to be outrageous, this intriguing debut will appeal to many readers. For most public library fiction collections.?Janet Ingraham, Worthington P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
