Soul Kiss
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by Shay Youngblood
Pub. Price $21.00    B&N Price: $14.70
Publisher: Putnam Pub
Format: Hardcover
Publication Date: May 1997

From Kirkus:
This first novel by playwright and storywriter Youngblood (The Big Mama Stories, 1989) is a young girl's tale of sadness and longing. It's also an erotic odyssey that seems to trace the narrator's incipient lesbianism to her misplaced feelings for her parents. In the 1960s, Mariah Santos, a seven-year-old girl of mixed racial heritage, lives happily with her mother, a military nurse, on a base in Kansas. But that idyllic life turns sour when Mariah's mother's lover breaks off their affair, and her mother becomes a drug addict. No longer do Mariah and her mother share their daily ``soul kisses'' or their love of words, and Mariah is soon shipped off to live with two great-aunts in Georgia, where she spends her adolescence longing for her mother's comforting bosom. Living with Faith and Merleen--who aren't actually sisters but lovers--Mariah quickly falls into their routines of home cooking, good manners, churchgoing, and hygiene. An excellent student, she also finds release in her cello. At age ten, she discovers her mother's trunk with all of its secrets, including information about her father, a painter living in Los Angeles. At 14, she deliberately causes enough trouble for her long-suffering aunts that they agree to let her head west to stay with her father. In their small West Hollywood apartment, Mariah develops a weird sexual life bordering on incest: She masturbates to her father's porn, wears his clothes when he's out, and has orgasmic dreams about him. When both he and she sense that things are getting out of hand, Mariah returns to Georgia, where she finally resolves her feelings about her long- absent mother and takes solace in the healing power of language. More mournful than soulful, this melancholic narrative is a decent addition to the literature of race and sexuality (with homage paid to Alice Walker et al.). Some didactic interludes intrude on an otherwise straightforward story of erotic confusion. -Kirkus
 
From Publisher's Weekly:
Youngblood (The Big Mama Stories) brings an intense sense of hermetic emotion to a powerfully subjective tale of one African American girl's coming-of-age. At seven, Mariah Santos is uprooted from Manhattan, Kans., and deposited with her strange and unearthly mother's two maiden aunts in Georgia. Although the quiet and respectable Aunt Merleen and Aunt Faith earnestly try to provide Mariah the structure and advantages that her mother, Coral, could not, Mariah's ability to love and connect with others is stunted. In her heart, she is an abandoned child. Like an animal orphaned before weaning, Mariah hungers for the intensely physical, symbiotic relationship she had with Coral and is drawn to women, on whom she gets crushes and with whom she feels complete. Over the years, her aunts occasionally reveal news of Coral, who travels from one city to another, in and out of drug rehab. At 15, when her frustration with the mysteries of sexual and familial belonging becomes intolerable, Mariah seeks her father, an artist named Matisse, whom she knows only from Coral's embroidered and inconstant memories, a worn photograph and some brief letters. Arriving in L.A. to live with Matisse, Mariah discovers her father knows nothing about being a parent, much less the progenitor of an almost-grown woman who bears a startling resemblance to the woman whose naked image he has obsessively explored on canvas. Mariah, unaccustomed to the company of a man, has no notion of the appropriate boundaries of familial love. Saturating her writing with haunting eroticism, lyrical description and complex characterization, Youngblood gets inside the soul of an acutely isolated girl and takes the pulse of her desire to break out of that solitude. -Cahners\Publishers_Weekly