Married but Still Looking
A Novel
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
New from the author of the national bestseller The Hearts of Men: a novel about one man’s quest to end his cheating ways.
Women have flocked to Genesis Styles ever since he was a teenager. He’s a good-looking, smooth-talking former pro-basketball player, but he has a problem: He has never been satisfied with just one woman. Then he meets Terri and everything changes. Sort of.
Genesis knows that Terri is perfect for him, and he asks her to marry him. But Genesis just can’t seem to stop cheating on Terri nearly every chance he gets. Genesis’s best friend, Prodigy, constantly warns him that he’s going to mess up the best thing ever to happen to him, but Genesis is not ready to listen.
After dealing with a family crisis, Genesis realizes the importance of his relationship with Terri, and he begins to change his cheating ways. He knows that once he says “I do,” everything will fall into place. But it may be too late, because one of his past indiscretions comes back to haunt him, and now Terri may have a few surprises of her own. . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This melodramatic, preachy novel chronicles the life of Genesis Styles, a retired basketball player in his late 20s. He works at a youth center in Atlanta and is engaged to Terri, who owns a small bookstore. Even though they are already living together, Terri correctly intuiting that all is not right between them is denying him sex until they are married. It should hardly make much difference, because horny, philandering Genesis has been having no problem satisfying his desires elsewhere. Can Genesis commit to one woman forever? Can his friend Prodigy Banks (the hero of Hunter's debut The Hearts of Men) who up until now has been helping him cover up his affairs talk some sense into him? There are family crises galore, as Genesis's sister Phyllis, a tough-as-nails lawyer, leaves her white husband and takes up with a black colleague. Another sister, Grace, returns to Atlanta from New York, planning to become a minister. Genesis's mother suffers a stroke, his brother is a drug-addicted convict and the whole family is still affected by the promiscuous lifestyle of the long-dead patriarch. When a former employee abandons her baby, Terri takes it in and, a week before the wedding, Genesis gets arrested for soliciting a prostitute. This is an irritatingly talky novel, with the characters constantly offering up facile insights along the lines of "you got to trust your heart." Hunter is a motivational speaker, and the shallow characters are used to spout clich d messages better confined to self-help books. FYI:Hunter self-published his debut; at BEA 2000 he secured a contract for a reprint ofThe Hearts of Men (which hit theEssence bestseller list) as well as this second effort. Booksellers may want to handsell to readers eager for tales of strong, responsible African-American men.
