Take Your Pleasure Where You Find It (2nd review)
by Thumper
I am usually excited when I get to read a new J. D. Mason novel. Over the years, she has become one of my favorite authors. When I get one of her new novels in my hands it is a cause for celebration because I know the novel is going to be good. Take Your Pleasure Where You Find It is mason’s latest novel, and it’s going down in history as the fist Mason novel that I cannot stand! The story of a young woman, who was abandoned as a baby and searches for the mother that abandoned her. The search leads her to three high school girlfriends, whose lives have taken different roads. The story is an old one that Mason failed to grasp the drama of, or update the story from a fresh perspective. I could have done without the book, and half way through it, I wished I had.
Renetta Jones, Phyllis Neville, and Freddie Palmer were close high school friends who were more like sisters than friends. Their senior year turned into a traumatic one when one of the girls became pregnant. On the night when the expectant mother had the baby, the three friends went to the hospital together and left the baby. The only evidence of their trip was a fuzzy surveillance image of three African American girls entering the hospital. Twenty years later, the abandoned baby, Tasha Darden, goes looking for her mother, and one of those women is going to tell her something before it’s all said and done.
I hate Take Your Pleasure Where You Find It! The story dragged on and on. I found that I was not interested in any of three women. There was nothing compelling, amusing or captivating about their lives. The three heifas just bored the hell out of me. But the one that really burned the hairs on my private parts was Tasha. At the beginning of the book, she hires a private investigator to locate the three girls, he does, and then she spends the rest of the book contemplating if she should make contact with the women or not! What kind of crap is that!? The cherry on the cake of it all was that Mason did not reveal who Tasha’s biological father was. Why, I have no idea. The identity could have made for a juicer story because Lord knows this puppy was tired on arrival.
I have to be upfront a sec. The premise of the story sounded familiar to me when I got the novel. The reason being is that I had already read and LOVED it many years before. Remember, how I told you all when I started reading books when I was 13 years old, I started off reading my mother’s books. At that time, my mother read nothing but romance type novels. So I cut my teeth on Sidney Sheldon, Judith Krantz and Jackie Collins books. Also, in that group was a novel titled Lace by Shirley Conran. At the time, Lace was a mega-selling novel. Lace had the same premise as Take Your Pleasure Where You Find It! Four prep school girls, best of friends, until their senior year when one gets pregnant and puts the baby, Lili up for adoption. The baby grows up in terrible foster homes, where she was abused; began living on the streets, eventually becomes a porn star and then a legitimate movie star. Lili, the child, goes looking for her mother. She gets into the lives of the four friends in order to hold something over their heads in order to force them to tell her the truth, which one of them is her mother. The famous line in the book, and the subsequent TV miniseries when she got the four former friends together was, "Which one of you bitches is my mother?"
Take Your Pleasure Where You Find It could have been, should have been a better book. As is fairly obvious, I don’t have any kind words for it at all! Strangely enough, this novel was not enough to knock me off the J. D. Mason fan wagon. I’m keeping my fingers crossed with the sincere hope that her next book is a helluva lot better that this one. If you are still interested in this storyline, I strongly recommend you check out Lace by Shirley Conran, the novel is still in print.
Related Links
Read a review written by Idrissa Uqdah who "Enjoyed " this book
http://aalbc.com/reviews/take_your_pleasure.html