TITLE: Orange Mint and Honey
AUTHOR: Carleen Brice
PUBLISHER: One World/Ballantine
PUBLISHED DATE: February 12, 2008
ISBN: 978-0345499066
PAGES: 324
I LOVED this book!!! Loved, loved loved it....and though it's definitely more of a new adult book - grown folks and teens alike could read and appreciate this book.
After a light night vision from an apparition in the likeness of Miss Nina Simone, herself, Shay Dixon decides to return home to her estranged mother. She's flunking out of graduate school, pulling her hair out, and in a deep depression she's not sure she knows how to pull herself out of.
When she returns home, she finds that her lush mother has sobered up, is mothering an adorable girl, and has reincarnated herself as a gardening tea sipping sage. Shay dogmatically holds on to her mother's former persona. How can a person forget a childhood spent living in fear of her mother's drunk rages, and days of abandonment - not knowing if her mother was dead or had left her for good be erased over night? How can her mother love this new girl, and not her? How can her mother be a goddess to a stronger she just met in AA over her?
Shay and her mother must both revisit old demons in order to forge a new relationship. This book is a beautiful and powerful read! It was also turned into a Lifetime movie a few years ago starring one of my favorite singers of all time, Jill Scott. (I am still waiting on Lifetime to re-air this movie. I refused to watch it because I hadn't finished the book at the time it first aired.)
Recommendation: READ IT!!!!! Hurry up! And then write Lifetime and tell them to air the movie!
Audience: Millennials and Beyond (....but I think there are some teens who might be with it.)