Blanche Passes Go by Barbara Neely

Neely writes genre fiction that is quite unlike any other out there: crime without the cops, mystery without a clue, and the romance of a strong, opinionated woman. It is beautiful and flawed and very real. Neely has an agenda, yes she does, but it’s revelatory to hear her concerns. She talks it all out on the page, so we get the picture from where she’s standing. She is fun but thoughtful; playful, but looks straight in the eye of some edgy situations. I mean, maybe you’ve thought about what to do when your neighbor is being beaten by her husband inside her house, loud enough for all the world to hear. Day after day. Well, Blanche comes up with a solution that worked pretty well and it didn’t involve a weapon of mass destruction or murder. Blanche constantly surprises us.

This mystery novel, #4 of the Blanche White series, brings Blanche down to North Carolina from Boston. Her sister’s son and daughter who are in her care, Malik and Taifa, are children no longer and are off for summer work in Vermont and Maine. Blanche is going to help her best friend, Ardell, with her catering business during the bicentennial celebrations in Farleigh, her hometown. Blanche had left behind in her hometown both a former lover, now married, and her rapist, so the pleasure of her homecoming was mitigated somewhat by what she might uncover hidden in her psyche. Besides, her Mom was as armored against intimacy as always, and never seemed to listen, even though she was getting older and needed more assistance than ever to keep everything in working order.

Nothing about this novel was ordinary. Almost every page expressed some real truth or revelation. Neely must have decided at some point she might be polite in company but she was going to write what she thought people ought to know. Thank god for it. Thank god for her. You don’t have to adhere to her beliefs, but by golly, she’s going to tell you what she thinks. She might even give some of us the words to articulate our own defense for a course of action we wanted to take but for one reason or another, felt unable. She makes a lot of sense. Blanche is an example to us.

As a mystery, the novel works very well. The denouement is guaranteed to blow you out of the water. As we begin, we imagine this novel might just be another opportunity to spend time with Blanche and hear her wisecracks on everything from real food to what men like. Nothing wrong with that! But Neely is too sophisticated and wise to just give us what we think we want: she’s gonna surprise us with something we can learn from, delighting us at the same time she is instructing us.

Blanche makes mistakes--really big, life-and-death mistakes--in this novel, all the while sounding like she has things pretty much under control. But we all have done that, haven’t we? Just as we think we’ve learned a few lessons and can dish it out, life and people surprise us. Neely makes us think. She teaches us how to think.

As the train from Boston to North Carolina makes it way south, Blanche slips into patios, anticipating her homecoming. It feels perfectly natural, though we know Blanche of Boston looking after teens is less lenient with herself. We want to relax, too, and hear the real Blanche fooling with Ardell, or romancing her new love interest, Thelvin.

The following quote is classic Neely:

”When the children were small and using up every moment when she wasn’t working for money, she’d soothed herself with a one-day-they’ll be grown fantasy. Now that they were practically grown, instead of trying to convince them to be careful of strangers, pick up their toys, and eat their okra. She was urging them to use condoms, to avoid hard drugs, and to become their very best selves. Different topics, more stressful topics. Who started that bullshit about parenting getting easier as the children got older? What parenting lost in intensity it picked up in worriation.

Or this:

”[Blanche] made up her own spiritual practice, including reverence for her Ancestors and the planet, and seeking energy from trees and healing from the sea. Some things she’d learned from African, Afro-Caribbean, Native American, and Asian ways of having a spiritual life, but she always added her personal twist. Until she’d come up with her own rituals she’d been hungry for ways to demonstrate her belief that there was more to life than she could see—ways that didn’t require her being a member of the Christian or the Muslim or any other religion that had played a part in African slavery. She also had no time for any religions that said she needed a priest or priestess to act as a go-between or worshipped a god called He. She was her own priest and goddess.”

The Blanche White series has four books. Each of them is special in its own way. Originally published in the 1990s by Penguin Books, they are now published in eBook format by Brash Books and can be bought wherever books are sold. Neely’s voice is extraordinary and outside the usual genre categorizations. The Blanche books are a little mystery, a little crime, a little romance, a little social commentary, and altogether unique. As a special treat, we are given a recipe for Blanche's Muscat Sauce from Blanche's Gig from Hell at the end.

My earlier review of Blanche Cleans Up has links to video of Neely talking about her work.


You can buy this book here: Tweet

Blanche Cleans Up (Blanche White #3) by Barbara Neely

Barbara Neely only wrote four Blanche books, but each one addresses issues central to life in America, and highlights the effect of these issues on the lives of America’s black folk. Blanche White, name notwithstanding, is a large woman with skin "on the extreme edge of blackness" who works as a "domestic." If you ever wanted to know what your maid or cook was thinking when they answered "Yes, Ma'm" with eyes cut off to the side, you're going to get your chance here. This woman is going to surprise and delight you. She has smarts and attitude to burn, and she has got three teens to take care of--so don't waste her time, sit down, and let her tell you how it plays.

Blanche struggles to navigate a dangerous world that doesn’t concern itself with her needs or those of her family. She is an amateur sleuth, which gives her plenty of latitude to indulge her curiosity about other people's lives. She is wily, but she is also strong and salty, blunt and clear. She is funny. She is an indispensable guide to looking at and discussing critical matters of concern to all Americans with regard to issues of race and class in our racially diverse neighborhoods. Neely chooses important social issues and has big black Blanche tell us all about sensitive issues she faces every day.

The Blanche novels are classified as mystery, but the murders are not the most interesting thing about this series. In this novel, what pins us to the page is what Blanche thinks about as she goes about her day as a cook in the household of a wealthy Boston couple, one of whom has put in his bid to be governor. There is plenty of intrigue surrounding the death of two young black men who used to work at the house, and then there is the death of a woman famous in her Roxbury neighborhood for knowing everything about everyone. The mystery "who-done-it" is a vehicle for Blanche to air her concerns.

Those concerns include protecting her family from the corrosion of bad influences, either from the sense of entitlement white and/or wealthy people have as a birthright, but also from the bottom-feeders in her own mostly black neighborhood. There is plenty of danger everywhere—from lead poisoning, for instance—and Blanche has got her hands full keeping body and soul together and caring for three teens. What struck me about the murders is that though two young black men and a black woman are killed, the official investigations never came close to discovering the culprit(s) and no one seemed to expect it. Blanche did her own investigations but never considered bringing what she learned to the police. Eventually the culprits were brought down by wrongdoing in another arena.

Blanche has a refreshing intellectual honesty. She feels jealousy, rage, hurt, but she works it out on the page, expressing feelings we've all had, and working it around until she admits she may have gone too far, or should be less possessive, or that she can't control what other people think or decide to do. She also expresses feelings of love, lust, and tenderness and can tell the difference between them.

“She’d stopped expecting life to be fair when she was about eight years old and had yet to be proven wrong. Still, that didn’t mean she couldn’t try to even things out a bit.”

The Blanche books were originally published by Penguin Books in the 1990s, and are now being reissued in ebook format by Brash Books. The third book in the series is just out in Kindle format with the fourth due in August this year. Those who want to be reacquainted with the smart and salty tongue of Blanche in Boston need wait no longer but can start reading today.

Author Barbara Neely has a Masters degree in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Pittsburgh and set up a community-based housing program for female felons in an area of Pittsburgh called Shady Side. She knows all about poor choices and failures of will. She knows what despair looks like. Somehow she keeps her sense of humor, and shares it with us in the Blanche books.

Diana Reese writing for The Washington Post published a review of the Blanche books and portions of an interview with Barbara Neely in January 2015. And the U.S. Embassy in Prague conducted a video interview of Barbara Neely on the occasion of the books being translated into Czech by high schoolers. The covers of those translations are especially fabulous. That short video is posted below.





You can buy this book here: Tweet