A Place to Land: Lost and Found in an Unlikely Friendship

This was such an amazing book. This author did not seek out the friendship that changed her life. It was almost thrust upon her. The message here is that we never know when we might be surprised by an unlikely friendship and perhaps we should be a little more open to that possibility. Martha Manning is a psychologist as well as an author, and she brings that insight into her writing. I had checked out this book from the library and read it years ago, but I always wanted to own a copy.

I've heard many women comment on the fact that a white woman and a black woman can never truly be friends because of the differences in everyday life that they experience. Martha Manning's book A PLACE TO LAND proves this generalizing theory to be null and void. Manning narrates the story of a budding friendship between herself, a forty-something white woman, and Raina, a younger unwed black mother of three small children.It all started one Christmas when Manning, after winning a battle against depression, decided to participate in the Adopt-A-Family program in her area. She was assigned to a family with twin babies, a little girl, and their mother. Forced to drop off the gifts in person, Manning found the recipient of her gifts to be Tracy Raina Grant, better known to her friends as Raina.Over the course of the next few months the women communicated via telephone for brief "how do you do" conversations. It was at this point that I questioned the possibility of the two women becoming more than acquaintances. However, I was proven to be drastically mistaken. The Grant and Manning families melded into one large unit, breaking the barriers of class, and most surprisingly, race. In fact, race was rarely a topic of conversation amongst them.I was inspired by the ties that bound these two women together. The Grant children were a joy to read about, and I even shed a few tears over the strong emotions I experienced while reading. Manning's writing is conversational; I felt as if she were speaking directly to me, relating the events of her life with a touch of humor. I recommend this book to friends, sisters, and sisterfriends alike for a new perspective on that thing we call friendship.Reviewed by CandaceKof The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers

This book is about a highly education woman who befriends a poor, black woman (a single mom) through a special Christmas program for the needy. This book details their friendship through various trial, such as the author's depression and Raina's son's cancer illness.I loved the humor in this book. Manning seems to write in a no-nonsense type of manner, which really matches with her personality. I loved how she described how 2 women, so different, were able to build a friendship. I loved how they were there for each other, especially when Raina's son became so ill with cancer. I loved the funny stories in the books about the kids and their "shopping trip" for their mother, when they pick out some pretty questionable items for their mothers.I would have preferred that the author have left out the cuss words. It seems that whenever I read cussing in a book, it is kind of distracting. Fortunately, there weren't too terribly many. Overall, this was a great book on friendship.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Rarely am I deeply affected by a work of nonfiction, but Martha Manning's a Place to Land gripped me in places scarcely touched by even great novels. This human story, at first seemingly unlikely to be of breadth or broad interest, masterfully plumbs the depths of love and understanding taking us from real life to tragic death. This is a genuine human story, a common and yet extraordinary love story - bloodstained and tear spattered. I must confess to being a helping professional, with interests drawn equally to both the theory and the practice of human change. As a family systems therapist, I have poked and prodded family hierarchies; shaken and upset family equilibriums; and paradoxically challenged people to do more of what ails them. These efforts have frequently been met with a mysterious mixture of success and failure that has led me back to a few simple truths about human nature. It is these fundamentals that resonant so clearly throughout this book.Like all of us, Ms. Manning's meanderings toward self-discovery are unmistakably influenced by her interactions with others. In this case the course of her and her family's life are forever changed by the chance meeting and unexpected friendship with a single black mother and her children. As this personal account of the coming together of two families elegantly reminded me, the primary strength of systems theory lies not in its complexities, but in its recognition of the basic creative power of human interaction, the simple notion that bringing people together can create something meaningful and beautiful, even where nothing existed before. She, and we as witnesses, cannot help but to be changed by the compelling story and the relationship that unfold. The message is that we are all linked together as both changers and the changed. The bonds of our shared humanity, our unexpected commonality live and breathe as one with us. A Place to Land is one such living and breathing story, a celebration of the power we have to create the everyday world we want to live in by how we choose to live our everyday lives and with whom we choose to live them.

Martha Manning has long been one of my favorite authors, and though she'd probably protest, she's someone I admire more than words can express. The way she writes is lyrical, almost poetic, with every sentence full of meaning and emotion. Yet her descriptions of life, death, love, feeling are so real and tangible that I can't imagine anyone not being touched by her words in some way. This book is about friendship, as the title suggests, but also about life and it's struggles. It's about death and about recovering. About depression and also about joy. This book, her words and her life, can make you both laugh and cry, sometimes all at once. This, along with her other works, is a must read by anyone who loves someone - anyone - and feels life passionately. Another brilliant work.