Book Review: Ernessa T. Carter's '32 Candles' is an 'Invitation to Crazy' in the Best Way

"My gawd, this was a good book." Those were the first words out of my mouth when I finished this 335-page read, one reason being I loved the way "32 Candles" ended and the other because initially I was ready for it to end from the first chapter.

Being a brown-skinned woman who never had a complex about complexion, it's always draining to read or hear about the much talked about division between light skin versus brown skin versus dark skin. I wasn't unpopular in high school nor was I all that popular, but it never made me much difference. So reading about a character who felt self-conscious about not being popular made me roll my eyes. Looking at the light-skinned pretty boy in high school as a savior was a little too cliché so I did a lot of huffing about that one, too. I was really worried that I wouldn't enjoy this book because I couldn't relate to her and thought she was too whiny about things that just didn't matter. I hoped her irritating way of being so helplessly in love would somehow become interesting instead of pitiful. And just as quickly as I hoped for it, "32 Candles" did just that.

Davie is a little girl who just wants to be loved by her mother the same way she was by her grandmother, but her mother is having none of that. Without a maternal instinct in her body, Cora is promiscuous, mentally and physically abusive to her only child Davie and she thinks dating married men is a hobby instead of shameful. Growing up in a household like that is bad enough, but when Cora starts sleeping with her love interest's, James Farrell, father and one of James' sisters, Vanessa Farrell, finds out, high school gets a whole lot worse. Davie's nickname Monkey Night resurfaces. After a particularly mean-spirited incident, Davie has had enough and leaves her small-town Mississippi home in hopes of finding a better life in Hollywood.

Davie, who'd decided at a young age not to speak after a Tina Turner disaster, has to open her mouth to survive. And after many years of not talking, she finally has to hear her own voice and others get to hear it, too--in song. To her own delight, she realizes she can sing, and that's how she makes a living. But when James shows up in a nightclub she's working in where Davie has started her new life some 15 years later, things get a whole lot trickier. The relationships and lives between Davie, her boss/boyfriend Nicky, the Ferrell family, and some other supporting characters are turned upside down from a woman who didn't used to say much. There is scandal and heartbreak. Friendships are tested, families are challenged, love is lost and/or strengthened.

I don't see too many books with the main characters being 20-somethings and early 30-somethings so I was especially interested in being able to relate to the high-top fades, pop star references and the slang. Of course anyone of any age group can enjoy "32 Candles," but I appreciated her being in an under-represented age in the African-American mainstream fiction market all the same. The fact that Davie was singing songs that were way beyond her years made her more interesting and showed she had an old soul with a young mind trying to keep up. It was fascinating watching her go from making grown-up choices to painfully showing just how much she still had to learn.

What I enjoyed about this book is that characters I expected to like all the way through started to make me loathe them and ones I didn't expect to like at all were the ones I sympathized with most, minus one who deserved what happened to his/her nose. Ernessa T. Carter didn't seem interested in a heroic story. This author seemed more interested in writing about humans. At one point, I wanted to start humming Luther Vandross' "I'm Only Human" even though the music plugs were always for Stokes, a music group I'd never heard of.

The film "Sixteen Candles" was plugged a lot, too, but I kept thinking of the movie "Crash" while reading this book, mainly because there are always three sides to every story, and I was intrigued to find out the other side of each person's madness along with the truth. Davie was supposed to be the one with the "Invitation to Crazy," but apparently all of these characters were invited to the same party.

This is an easy 5 out of 5 stars and one of my top five favorite fiction novels I've ever read in my entire adulthood. I will definitely re-read this book at a later date.

"32 Candles" is available for purchase on June 22, 2010.