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Summary
Summary
"Without question, this is McMillan's best. A glorious novel....A moving tapestry of familial love and redemption."-- The Washington Post
With her hallmark exuberance and a cast of characters so sassy, resilient, and full of life that they breathe, dream, and shout right off the page, Terry McMillan has given us a tour-de-force novel of family, healing, and redemption. A Day Late and a Dollar Short takes us deep into the hearts, minds, and souls of America--and gives us six more friends we never want to leave.
Author Notes
Terry McMillan was born in Port Huron, Michigan on October 18, 1951. She received a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in 1986, studied film at Columbia University, and enrolled in the Harlem Writer's Guild. Her books include Disappearing Acts, Mama, A Day Late and a Dollar Short, The Interruption of Everything, Getting to Happy, and Who Asked You? Her books Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back were adapted as major motion pictures.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Viola Price is the truth-telling, trash-talking Las Vegas matriarch at the center of McMillan's eagerly awaited new novel. As the book begins, Viola is in the hospital recovering from a devastating asthma attack, and she's decided to turn her life around, even if it means causing her large, unruly clan a little discomfort. Lewis, Viola's only son, is a drifter, handicapped both by his genius IQ and his alcoholism. Janelle, the youngest child, is perpetually searching for the perfect career, while ignoring signs that her 12-year-old daughter is in trouble. Viola's relationship with her perpetually angry middle daughter, Charlotte, is so volatile that Charlotte periodically hangs up in the middle of phone conversations, while Paris, Viola's eldest, appears to be brilliantly successful, but is actually desperately lonely and has developed a dependency on pills to maintain her superwoman act. To add to the confusion, Cecil, Viola's husband of 40 years, has moved in with his girlfriend, Brenda, a welfare mother pregnant with a child that may or may not be his. The story of how the family puts it back together is told from the perspective of all six main characters, and McMillan moves easily and skillfully from voice to voice. The characters are not entirely sympatheticDlike Viola, McMillan (How Stella Got Her Groove Back) doesn't sugarcoat the truthDbut knowing their weaknesses does make their acts of courage all the more meaningful. This is a moving and true depiction of an American family, driven apart and bound together by the real stuff of life: love, loss, grief, infidelity, addiction, pregnancy, forgiveness and the IRS. (Jan. 15) Forecast: Gutsier and less glitzy than How Stella Got Her Groove Back, McMillan's latest has perhaps the broadest appeal of any of her novels. A major national advertising campaign, national publicity, a TV and radio satellite tour and a 12-city author tour will get the word out and drive the book toward the top of the charts. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
After several years, McMillan is back with her distinctive style of unveiling the trials and mishaps of modern-day life for black folks. This time she focuses on the Price family: mother, father, three daughters, and a son in various stages of various life crises. Age and disappointment with her life and the lives of her children have driven Viola into a strident bitterness, and she has driven away her husband of 38 years with her constant criticism and cynicism. Cecil still loves Viola but accepts his banishment and starts over with a younger woman and her three small children. The Price children--Paris, Charlotte, Lewis, and Janelle--struggle with sibling jealousies, marital infidelities, child abuse, alcohol, and drugs. They have grown apart since all but Charlotte moved from Chicago to Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and time and distance aggravate divisions among siblings and parents. Each of the children finds it hard to let long-maintained personal defenses down, even when their lives fall apart. Paris, the oldest and the "perfect one," can't reveal her loneliness since her divorce; addicted to painkillers, she maintains a punishing career schedule. Confronted with the fact that her second husband has been molesting her teenage daughter, Janelle has to choose between financial security and protecting her daughter. A strong matriarch, Viola struggles to hold the family together while she loses the softness within that had held her marriage together. McMillan has each family member tell Price history from his or her own perspective until the family reassembles after Viola's death. McMillan fans will be thrilled by her comeback. --Vanessa Bush
Kirkus Review
A great big family with nothing in common except blood. Viola Price, 55, is a barbecue entrepreneur, mother of four, and grandmother many times over, thanks to the four children she had so fast they felt more like a litter, except each one turned out to be a different animal: Paris is a successful caterer and cookbook author with a taste for the best in life, including men; Charlotte, a tough businesswoman, owns several Chicago Laundromats; Lewis is an amiable alcoholic with rheumatoid arthritis; and Janelle, a housewife, is forever taking courses in interior decorating. When a sudden, severe asthma attack lands Viola in the hospital, the clan gathers in Las Vegas to be near her, eager to help and of the belief that their father's unexpected desertion triggered the attack, even though their mother insists that it happened because she was, as usual, worrying about them. Which doesn't change the fact that Cecil Price says he just walked out when he couldn't take one more minute of her bossing and bad temper. Viola insists that she threw him out, but, regardless, Cecil is no more to her than a bad habit she's had for thirty-eight years. To others, he's an aging hipster, with a blossoming paunch and an outmoded Jheri curl mocked by allnot that his new flame, a welfare huzzy with three kids by different men, cares. Viola, though, has had it: she doesn't want Cecil back, not in this life or the next. Anyway, the children have other things to worry about: Paris is a pill-popping workaholic; Charlottes a control freak; Janelle seems to be oblivious to her own daughters emotional problems, and Lewis is just plain drowning in a river of troubles. Nonetheless, Viola isn't shy about offering advice, and she gives everyone an earfula favor they return. The reunited Prices squabble, swap life stories and some nitty-gritty philosophy, and get to know the best and the worst about each other all over again. Then they chip in to buy their ailing mother new furniture and a fabulous cruise to nowhere, until a second, fatal asthma attack fells Viola. Her legacy: four poignant, hilarious letters, one for each of the grown children she loved so fiercely. Great storytelling with one catch: no plot. But McMillan's trademark earthiness and wonderful dialogue more than compensate. This bestselling author (How Stella Got Her Groove Back, 1996, etc.) has a rare gift for creating living, breathing people on the page. Book-of-the-Month Club/Literary Guild/Doubleday Book Club main selection; author tour; TV and radio satellite tour
Library Journal Review
McMillan returns with the story of the Price familyÄmatriarch Viola, occasional husband Cecil, and four loyal adult kids. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Can't nobody tell me nothing I don't already know. At least not when it comes to my kids. They all grown, but in a whole lotta ways they still act like children. I know I get on their nerves--but they get on mine, too--and they always accusing me of meddling in their business, but, hell I'm their mother. It's my job to meddle. What I really do is worry. About all four of 'em. Out loud. If I didn't love 'em, I wouldn't care two cents about what they did or be the least bit concerned about what happens to 'em. But I do. Most of the time they can't see what they doing, so I just tell 'em what I see. They don't listen to me half the time no way, but as their mother I've always felt that if I don't point out the things they doing that seem to be causing 'em problems, who will? Excerpted from A Day Late and a Dollar Short by Terry McMillan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
| The Way I See It | p. 13 |
| Cold Keys | p. 56 |
| Clearing House Sweepstakes | p. 76 |
| Track | p. 97 |
| Nothing in Common Except Blood | p. 121 |
| Behind My Back | p. 143 |
| Every Shut Eye Ain't Closed | p. 169 |
| Hives | p. 180 |
| Hot Links | p. 197 |
| Fish Dreams | p. 213 |
| Ten Thousand Things | p. 238 |
| Liquid Jesus | p. 262 |
| Before I Pop | p. 274 |
| Bingo | p. 290 |
| Housecleaning | p. 306 |
| Hand After Hand | p. 315 |
| Throbbing | p. 325 |
| Credit | p. 339 |
| Cancer | p. 349 |
| Puff on That | p. 370 |
| Lucky Strikes | p. 380 |
| Burnt Toast | p. 403 |
| Refills | p. 420 |
| Sinners | p. 438 |
| A New Life | p. 451 |
| Why Am I Wearing My Mama's Shoes? | p. 477 |
| Sorry | p. 491 |
| Dreaming in Black and White | p. 506 |
| Two of Wands, or Hanged Man, Reversed | p. 517 |
| One Entrance to Another | p. 532 |
| Old Purses | p. 540 |
| Sock-It-to-Me Cake | p. 560 |
| What I'm Fighting For | p. 578 |
| Loosening the Knots | p. 587 |
| Help | p. 606 |
| Thanksgiving | p. 624 |
