Ain't Gonna Be the Same Fool Twice
A Novel
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5.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Stevie Stevenson graduates from college and embraces the liberating California lifestyle in award-winning author April Sinclair’s follow-up to her “vivid and brilliant” (San Francisco Review of Books) debut novel Coffee Will Make You Black
Growing up black in 1960s Chicago, Jean “Stevie” Stevenson came of age amid the tumult of the civil rights movement, learning to value not just her race and gender but her sexuality as well. Now, nearly a decade later, Stevie is a college graduate enjoying a week of vacation in San Francisco. After getting a taste of the bohemian life, she can’t bring herself to return home to her family and journalism career in Chicago. Instead, she’s determined to spread her wings and discover her true self, experimenting with free love, gay pride, and vegetarianism; forging a friendship with a gay disco queen; and taking a job at the feminist Personal Change Counseling Center. As she falls in and out of love, Stevie takes time to observe both the absurd and the liberating qualities of the West Coast hippie lifestyle—and is constantly reminded that the journey to self-discovery likely has no end point.
Written with the same bright wit and endless charm that made Coffee Will Make You Black such a beloved book, Ain’t Gonna Be the Same Fool Twice is a delightful continuation of Stevie’s story that was hailed by Salon as “ripely funny, unpretentious, and sincere.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
If a novel about a bisexual black woman's pilgrim's progress through the 1970s can be said to conform to the aesthetic of Norman Rockwell, this is it. Jean Stevenson, aka Stevie, the heroine of Coffee Will Make You Black, leaves her native Chicago for college in an unnamed Midwestern city. In Sinclair's cursory treatment of those years, Stevie settles in with a mixed group of friends and takes her first female lover. A graduation trip to San Francisco results in an extended stay, and she meets Traci, an attractive feminist, and moves into her extra bedroom. After the women become lovers, Traci guides Stevie through the worlds of sex, drugs and gay politics. When the relationship dissolves, Stevie moves in with Sterling, a gay drag queen. Now employed, and with new friends, she continues to explore her sexuality through affairs with Sterling's brother and a female co-worker. When her grandmother takes ill, Stevie gains some much-needed insight, leading to a resolution that ends the novel on a happy note. With the exception of Stevie and Traci, Sinclair's characters are all types: effeminate gays, militant black nationalists, etc. Stevie narrates all this with good humor. She's engaging enough, but the sunny earnestness of it all will make some readers long for at least some of the layered wit that Armistead Maupin brought to me-generation San Francisco in Tales of the City. There's a lot of self-exploration here, but it's much wider than it is deep: Sinclair surrounds everything with a nostalgic haze that does justice to neither the personal nor the political aspects of her themes of feminism, sexuality and race. Author tour.
Customer Reviews
Sequel to Coffee Will Make you Black
As delightful as the first. I couldn't put it down and finished it in one night. I literally could not put it down- my Mom told me multiple times to go to sleep, but I HAD to know everything this book said. M