Almost Family
By Roy Hoffman
(University Alabama Press, Paperback, 9780817310318, 256pp.)
Publication Date: August 2000
Categories: General
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Nebraska Waters is black; Vivian Gold is Jewish. In an Alabama kitchen where, for nearly thirty years, they share cups of coffee, fret over their children, and watch the civil rights movement unfold on the TV screen and out their window, they are like family--almost.
As Nebraska makes her way, day in and day out, to Vivian's home where she cooks and helps tend the Gold children, the bond between the women both strengthens and frays. The "almost" threatens to widen into a great divide.
The two women's husbands affect their relationship, as do their children. This is particularly true of the youngest children, Viv Waters and Benjamin Gold, who, born the same year, are coming of age in a changing South.
Reminiscent of Peter Taylor's Wife of Nashville, Alfred Uhry's Driving Miss Daisy, and the television series I'll Fly Away, Roy Hoffman's novel explores the relationship that begins when one person goes to work for another, and their friendship, across lines of income, race, and religion, develops dimensions of understanding--and misunderstanding
Roy Hoffman, a native of Mobile, Alabama, worked in New York City for twenty years as a journalist, speechwriter, editor, and teacher, before returning south as Writer in Residence at his hometown newspaper, the Mobile Register. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Esquire, Newsweek on Campus, Southern Living, and Preservation.
"Hoffman never lets facts flatten characters; he has made them too human--too strong or too stubborn—for that."—New Yorker
"Everything in this book rings true--the dialogue, the cadences, the deft-touch observations, the best and worst of human nature."—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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