Love Like Gumbo by Nancy Rawles

Family. Love Like Gumbo is about the meaning of family and the responsibilities and place that the main character, Grace Broussard, serves in her family. Love Like Gumbo by first time novelist Nancy Rawles is centered around Grace, the youngest in a family of Creoles. Set in 1978, Los Angeles, 20 year old Grace wants her independence from her family. So she devises a Ten Point Plan to accomplish this feat. What Grace doesn’t count on is the ghost of her late father, T-Papa, and his desire that she not separate from the family. Told during the Christmas and New Year holidays, the novel tells the history of Grace and her family. Moving elegantly and smoothly between 1978-79 Los Angeles and events of the past that shaped Grace and leads her to eventually want destroy family ties.

I’m not a fan of "flashbacks" in novels...not by a long shot! Dennis Williams’ Somebody’s Child flashbacks caused me to stop reading it. My first attempt at Beloved by Toni Morrison made me so mad that I threw the book across my bedroom, while screaming at the top of my lungs, leaving it on the floor where it laid for months! Every time I walked past it, I got mad. When I swept my bedroom floor, I swept around it. If Toni Morrison had walked past me on the street, I would have slapped her. The way that many are written disturbs the flow of the story. (I can now happily state that I finished Beloved after some years and have become a HUGE Morrison fan.) This novel has flashbacks and it WORKS. The events that contributed in defining Grace. From her first encounter with racism and intra-racism, discovering masturbation (thereby, discovering a part of herself), what she was doing when T-Papa died, are handled as flashbacks. The flow of the novel wasn’t interrupted or disrupted in anyway. It colored another portion of Grace, making her more human.

The "supporting cast" is drawn just as fully as Grace. It is important to remember that this is Grace’s story so a majority is told by Grace’s point of view. The narrator adds a few brush strokes to T-Papa, Camille, her mother, and her siblings. It is wonderfully illustrated that Grace’s images of people in her life is not always true. The secrets that motivates the actions of her parents are not known by Grace. This is where this novel sings. Not only is Grace’s view presented, but her whole world is out on display, like a small globe with a house, water and "snow" inside.

Grace is a full bodied character. Easily identifiable with the way she felt about herself, her family. Grace isn’t written as a "preachy" character. A definite plus. Grace is a lesbian. Her sexuality isn’t spotlighted to the point that it is her main purpose in life. It’s a part of Grace, the same as her skin color, or the fact that her mother’s name is Camille. But it is examined. For this is one of the essential components that is Grace. It’s not "preachy" or parading her homosexuality down Main Street on the fourth of July. Don’t preach, tell a story. Better yet, tell a GOOD story. Rawles does exactly that.

When I finished this novel and thought about how to write the review, I didn’t want to emphasis Grace’s sexuality because I want everyone to read this book to enjoy a wonderful story and didn’t want potential readers to prejudge this novel because of it. I wouldn’t think that a call of maturity would be necessary. I didn’t want this book to be classified as a "lesbian" book. It deserves to be a simply a good book with a good story. Easily in the same class and caliber as E. Lynn Harris’ novels or the novels by Connie Briscoe, BeBe Moore Campbell, and dare I say McMillan. Well, I dare say it. Yell it from a rooftop or two.