A DAY LATE AND A DOLLAR SHORT is Terry McMillan's first book in five years. 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. With her hallmark exuberance and 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 novel that takes us ever-further into the hearts, minds, and souls of America-and gives us six more friends we never want to leave.
Terry McMillan is the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of four novels: Mama, Disappearing Acts, Waiting to Exhale, and How Stella Got Her Groove Back, and the editor of Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Fiction. She lives in northern California with her family.
July
2001
