Review for A Mentor and her Muse by Susan Sage
For those of above average intelligence (required here), you’ll enjoy this road trip tale of a white 50ish jaded and lonely female educator that helps a 15 year old inner city black girl (and herself) escape the economically depressing Flint Michigan summer. Off to Ohio, Virginia, and North Carolina, we are taken on an odyssey of self-examination, and mighty revelation awaits both lead characters. This is highly original work for realism with literary overtones filled with clarity and skilled exposition of characterizations. The lead character Maggie is the big show, a teacher/writer painfully self-aware of all things to the point of depression and hedging madness. She has known great tragedy and loss, thus life seems like a series of events to be endured to some lackluster end. The narrative of Maggie is told with raw visceral terms and some flashbacks that perfectly fill gaps of understanding. The author has a smooth natural style of diction. This is a tale of inner space of emotions dealing with family, love, sex, aging, work, fulfillment, happiness, and having something, someplace we might belong. This is a story of the yearning and sadness and the hope for something better, a cohesion. It is a haunting tale of rescue for the hopeless and rescuing the self from the angst, the complete symphony of disconnection, to go it alone if necessary, and all against the question of time, how much time do we have left? I found the story to be alluring and had to know to the end what would become of these two women. A well-crafted novel of both sadness and measured hope, I found this to be original in style, which is the first and main component of a thinking author. I was emotionally overcome by the ending having a mysterious beauty of untethered iconoclasm.
