Third Girl from the Left Martha Southgate ISBN: 0618470239 Format: Hardcover, 288pp Pub. Date: September 2005 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company BBP Sales Rank: 69,599 List Price: $24.00 BBP Price: $17.99 Save 25%
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FROM THE PUBLISHER

"This novel tells a story of African-American women struggling against all odds to express what lies deepest in their hearts. Like Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay or E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, it ranges freely through time, fact, and fiction to weave a story about history and art and their place in the lives of three women." ""My mother believed in the power of movies and the people in them to change a life, to change her life." So explains Tamara, daughter of Angela, granddaughter of Mildred - the three women whose lives are portrayed in stunning detail in this novel spanning three generations of one family." "Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1970 is not a place where a smart black girl wants to linger. For Angela, twenty years old and beautiful, the stifling conformity is unbearable. She heads to Los Angeles just as blaxploitation movies are pouring money into the studios and lands a few bit parts before an unplanned pregnancy derails her plans for stardom." "For Mildred, movies have always been a blessed diversion in a life marked by the legacy of the 1921 Tulsa race riots. But after Angela leaves Tulsa following a bitter fight, the distance between them grows into a breach that remains for years." It falls to Tamara, a budding documentarian - raised in LA by Angela as though they have no family, no history - to help her mother and grandmother confront all that has been silenced and left unsaid in their lives.