Bebe Moore Campbell: What you owe me

Review of the Audiobook Version, Unabridged.

"What you owe me" by Bebe Moore Campbell starts off quite well, and carries on through most of the novel.

It is a historic two-generational novel loosely covering racial struggles of various minorities and their emergence in the latter half of the last century. It makes for a compelling drama and listening it on a tape (which is what I did) was easy.

The story revolves around an African American lady with sharp sales skills and her struggles in Post World War II Los Angeles to gain some footing in a "White" world. Her dreams are then picked up by one of her daughters and eventually leads to success.

But in a classic mirror of the Indian style of movies where the director looses his bearing in the second half, the book drops off into a ramble in the second half.

The ending is not particularly a cliffhanger, and there are definitely loose ends that never get tied.

While there are allegories galore throughout the work, sometimes it is just downright irritating, when you have to sit down and listen a rambling description to "Blair", one of the characters, a senior marketing or some gobbledygook executive spend a night hungry at home because there's no food left.

It's stupid - the character can't even think of going down to Safeway and picking up extra food. Some people may liken this to "realism" in characters, but that's just nonsense. Stupid people are stupid and they have no place in a novel, just like most body fluids have no place in a good photograph.

While the book starts off displaying all the hardships African Americans face in the "White" world, later on, there is a sudden, illogical transformation and things come to them with sudden ease, which is a little perplexing. It's like the authoress is trying to eat her cake, not being satisfied with just possessing it.

There are also a tad too many characters in the novel, and they get dropped of with a lack of deftness. One of them is Hossana's sister who suffers a great loss and then we never find out what happened to her. Instead, we are treated time and again with putrid details of Blair's narcotic jaunts.

Rating: 2/5

Worth listening once with your hands on the fast-forward button

Book Link: http://us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/what_you_owe_me.html