Leaving

Leaving is Richard Dry's debut novel and it is excellent!! It is the story of Ruby Washington's family - three generations and their actions and reactions to survive against all odds. In 1959, Ruby, poor and pregnant, hastily leaves small town Norma, South Carolina for Oakland, California with her younger half brother (Easton) in tow. She moves in with her father and his lover and finds work as a seamstress. Dry then blends in the political and social happenings of the time and we watch how Ruby struggles to hold her family together despite racism, incest, domestic violence, and the influx of drugs in the community.Weighing in at 450 pages, Dry gives the reader a lot to consider. The interrelationships of the characters are complex and engaging. Dry provides up close and personal perspectives of the movement through the eyes of a college age Easton when he ventures south to participate in a Civil Rights march in Selma, Alabama. Another supporting character embodies the Black Panther philosophies; Lida (Ruby's daughter) resorts to prostitution to support a drug habit; Love (Ruby's grandson) grows up with heroin-addicted parents and experiences the juvenile justice system. Every character has a unique voice/view and a heartbreaking story, which Dry tells with compelling realism. Interweaved within the story are historical (factual) citations and references that shaped race relations and influenced the Black experience in America. Dry writes with conviction and purpose as evidenced in the title reference and the theme of "leaving" is echoed in the character's actions, a few examples are: Ruby's exodus from South Carolina is necessary to avoid racial violence; whereas Love escapes to the same South Carolina to avoid the ills of urban gang life. Lida's choice to leave Ruby's home is a result of her fleeing pain and unresolved issues; Marcus (Lida's husband) leaves for three years to launch a musical career, etc. This book was simply a good read -- the characters and plot were well developed; pacing was sound and the story moved quickly (which made the 450 pages easier to digest).

I gravitated towards this book initially because of the many good things I had heard about it. This book sucked me in immediately and it's thick size did not matter, until the end when I wished it would continue.Richard Dry captures the "black experience" in America better than anyone ever has in the past. It is not a "preachy", "blame the white man" novel, but a FACTUAL, ACTUAL account of the travesties and inhumane conditions blacks have and continue to endure in the "land of the free". At times I was angered and saddened over particular events that I had never heard of. But as an AA woman I gathered the strength inherited from my people to face the truth. Something has sparked in me after completing this book, a renewed spirit maybe? An awakening? "Leaving" should become required reading for all students in high school. It is too important to ignore.EXCELLENT WORK MR. RICHARD DRY! Anyone who reads this book owes it to the public to spread the word. PICK THIS ONE UP! It is a classic!

If fiction has any place in today?s world, it is to help us participate emotionally in the lives of those whose stories we would otherwise know only from the outside. ?Leaving? by Richard Dry presents its readers with a great gift?the possibility of ?getting under the skin? of people whose presence is everywhere, but whose lives are often opaque, especially in the mutually agreed upon segregation that is practiced in cities like Oakland.Dry tells the story of three generations of Oakland?s black community beginning with their flight from South Carolina and ending on Cranston street near 7th in West Oakland. While there is no actual Cranston Street in Oakland, this is the neighborhood that came to national attention during the earthquake of 1989 when the Cypress Freeway collapsed. Race-based resentment of that freeway was well-publicized, and the rebuilt Cypress structure now circles its border. Residents renamed the old roadway the Mandela Parkway. (Oakland has an outstanding number of streets named for revolutionary leaders, including Gerry Adams.)What?s different about Dry?s telling of Ruby Washington?s story is his ability to unfold his characters and their times without scolding. His narrative tone is compassionate without being apologetic, and the result is a novel that grips the reader?s imagination and holds it there. Surely the description of the brothers? return to the South by bus is some of the best writing about teens and preteens anywhere.The chronology of the story is broken, and events from 1960 to 1993 are told in a sequence that places them in a nearly random order that the reader follows best by using the family tree provided at the beginning of the book. Who is this? and what?s happening now? are questions one asks initially. Finally, the effect is not chaos, but the recreation of lives lived in the presence of forces beyond anyone?s control. Characters are blindsided, let down, thwarted until they learn to bounce, like Love and his brother Li?l Pit. Or they suddenly die. Or they seat themselves deeply in spiritual values, like Ruby, and try to roll with the punches.The outlines of many of these stories are well-known, but Dry?s version avoids the subtly glamorized and false style of the movies, and the patently didactic style of much other writing, with its subtext of blame and finger-pointing. I resisted reading this book, and in the end, I couldn?t put it down.

LEAVING is a compelling novel about the struggles and challenges of three generations of an African American family. In reading this book, one takes a journey into the lives of the characters. The author develops the characters with a depth and poignancy and compassion that make this a compelling novel. The chronological sequence gracefully moves back and forth giving the reader a powerful societal and generational felt sense of both the history and lives of African Americans in our country. I look forward to reading more of this author's work!

"Leaving" is absolutely remarkable. I thought I would be the worst possible audience for such a book -- as an individualist, I think the current climate of "special pleading" for various races and ethnicities and religions and genders and orientations and ages and handicaps has created a pernicious cult of victimization that poses an enormous threat to this country and to every individual in it, and some of the characters in Richard Dry's book are violent members of the underclass, people whose skin we are invited to get inside and whose viewpoint we are asked to share or at least understand -- and yet the book knocked me out. Through a combination of personal experience, research, and an enormously powerful imagination, Dry has made a world that in real life I would go out of my way to avoid, real and immediate and important. And none of this conveys the beauty of a novel I never thought I'd like, but one that wound up haunting me.-- Paul GuayCo-screenwriter of "The Little Rascals," "Liar, Liar" and "Heartbreakers"