Jim and Louella's Homemade Heart-Fix Remedy
A Novel
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4.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
A sizzling, smart, and utterly engaging novel about sex, love, folklore, and family history from the author of Redemption Song and The Haunting of Hip Hop.
With her characteristic sense of humor and a good dose of motherly wit, Bertice Berry spins the endearing tale of Jim and Louella Johnson, an elderly couple in a southern town who have settled into a marriage that has long lost its pizzazz. Louella, fed up with her lackluster love life, decides to contact her departed ancestors for some advice. Conjuring up her mother, grandmother, and aunt in a dream, she receives a delightful lesson in the art of reigniting the fires of love.
Even more startling, the Johnsons discover they can help others rejuvenate their passions, heal their hearts, and mend their souls
Written in language that is folksy yet eloquent, Jim and Louella's Homemade Heart-Fix Remedy is an uplifting and flat-out funny celebration of the connections between past and present, the importance of family, and the pleasures of the body and the heart.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In an unusual testament to the undying power of love, Berry (Redemption Song; The Haunting of Hip-Hop) builds her third novel around the sexual reawakening of a middle-aged couple. When Jim, in his early 60s, and Louella, in her late 50s, begin to experience a downturn in their love life, Louella is visited by dreams of ancestors bearing advice on how to rekindle the flames. A marathon-length spell of torrid sex ensues and is followed by even more miraculous developments: Jim and Louella learn to read minds, becoming privy to the secret pain, frustration and vanity of the inhabitants of their small country town. Their strange transformation leads them on a magic-realist journey into the heart of their community, allowing them to stoke long-dead or dwindling sexual fires, end jealousies and destroy ancient fears. Berry's lack of pretension and focus on the humorous side of redemption make her daring premise work. Communicating a belief that all people are inherently good and that negativity is but a manifestation of buried pain the novel works both as an entertaining narrative and a parable of love. The informal "remedies" include a focus on the individual ("Everybody gotta do what works for them"), homespun metaphors ("sadness and pain can creep on you like a weed takes over a yard") and moments of revelation that stress admitting flaws in oneself and then eliminating them ("Lord, help my brother here to be strong, and then Lord, show him where he's wrong"). Extremely sexually explicit at turns, the novel is perhaps not for the prudish; but the book, for all its sexual content, isn't really about sex: it's about how cultivating a spiritual life improves not only sexual experience, but all aspects of human existence.
