Rainbow Reviews

BOOK BLURB:
The Charleston. Hard times. Jazz. Foreclosures. Breakaways and cutting loose. Twilight Amery sets her sights on Harlem, where a girl with a voice ~ even a white man's bastard from Alabama ~ can be somebody. Hopping a freight train, she joins up with the beautiful, bitter Mr. Stone and the compellingly magnetic Hector, two Harlem men trying to get home however they can. Faced with club-wielding Pinkerton agents, an inconvenient dead body, and a shortage of money, Twilight and Stone forge an alliance while pursuing their individual mating dances with Hector. Then an old enemy of Stone's intercepts them and issues a challenge that Twilight makes the mistake of accepting.

BOOK REVIEW:
Although slavery in the South was supposedly ended by the Emancipation Proclamation, Reconstruction and its aftermath never meant realistic freedom for those born into slavery nor their descendants. Even into the ensuing decades of the twentieth century, being black, or of mixed-race, meant condemnation, punishment, rape, and murder. The only escape that seemed possible meant getting on out of the South, and young Twilight Amery, an illegitimate offspring of a white man, a cotton picker whose home has just been secretly repossessed, determines to head for Harlem, in New York City, and try for a singing position there. If not that ~ if she can't get out of Alabama, if the Pinkerton railroad detectives catch and cripple her ~ well, then death will be the next outcome, if she has to lie down in front of an oncoming freight train.

Life in Harlem won't be perfect either: you can take the girl out of Alabama, but you can't take Alabama out of the girl. Nor can you make white racists kind-hearted, nor any man respect a girl if they refuse to do so. Violence doesn't just find a home in the South either, but lives everywhere it chooses, including Harlem. Twi doesn't have many choices, and she must learn, as always, to make the best of what life does allot her. In Harlem, she finds a life of rewarding pleasure and extremes of joy and disappointment, and sexuality.

“Steal Away” provides an exciting erotic experience, as well as exploration of a significant period in American history, one which shaped our times to come and the future of modern music. Author Amber Green does not stint at elucidating the ugly and violent background of the South at this time, nor of its concomitant violence in the North.

What a rewarding delight is this book! Rich in vivid poetic imagery that awakens all the senses, rife with historical accuracy and period detail, Steal Away immediately enraptures the reader and elicits intense empathy for the characters. From the beginning, I was glued to the page, unable to turn away, as the lives told here unfolded. In just a few turns of phrase, Amber Green is able to impact the reader so powerfully that we see, feel, and sense all that her protagonist experiences.

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