Third Girl from the Left

This was a different from how the title lef tme feeling. I resonated with this story and my own conflicts with my mom. It made me feel like everyone doesn't have a picture perfect cookie cutter relationship with their mom and made me appreciate my mom and our differences much more. I loved the setting of where the mother was from and the history behind certain decisions that were made.

I loved the "Fall of Rome" and I was thrilled to find this book completely unexpectedly on my library shelf. WHAT A BOOK! It grabbed me from the first page until the very last word. I couldn't wait to turn the page to see how Ms. Southgate would turn her next phrase. The 3 women are fascinating and multi-dimensional, the men in their life, interesting in their own right and not subjugated to staying in the shadow of these powerful and beautiful women. I can't even write much more than this. I cannot intellectualize the feelings this book brought up in me. I can only say, I LOVED IT...

Martha Southgates Third Girl from the Left, is excellently written with a beleivable plot. I thought that Southgates references and detail regarding the 1970's Blaxploitation movies was very insightful. The relationship between the three women in the story is one that strikes a chord with any woman that is fortunate enough her mother and her child in her life. It is a reminder of how complicated this life can be. I have not yet read the Fall of Rome, but plan to soon. I highly recommend this book.

Tam works as the second AC on a network show, a job most people in the industry would literally kill for. All her life she's been drawn to the moving image, and on her wall at home she's hung a still from the Alexander Mackendrick masterpiece THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS. And yet as Tam comes to realize, real life can be even complicated than the movies. She's the product of many geberations of strong black female presences, most notably her mother, Angela, and Angela's mother, Mildred from Tulsa Oklahoma, where once upon a time, in the darkness of a miserable past, race riots turned upside down the whole city and to some degree have shaped our understanding of racial justice and harmony ever since then. Martha Southgate is an author new to me, but I was drawn to reading her novel after reading Donald Bogle's book on black presence in Hollywood. This summer I had the great pleasure of speaking with the scholar Valerie Boyd about her current project, researching the experience of black women in Hollywood, and Southgate's novel seemed like the next step on my journey of exploration. Angela Edwards never became a big star, and Southgate cleverly avoids the pitfalls of setting a novel inside a real scene (basically, the "blaxploitation" craze of the 1970s) by characterizing her heroine as the "third girl from the left," a bit player in a world where Fred Williamson and Pam Grier became international stars for a brief while--till white interest and financing moved on. Angela drifts into an affair with Sheila, a woman she meets at an employment agency, but doesn't seem able to commit fully, and never considers herself a lesbian, especially after she finds herself pregnant with Tamara. Meanwhile back in Tulsa gossips tell a straitlaced Mildred that her daughter is to be seen nude on screen in FOXY BROWN and in response, Angela is now "dead" to her family. Generations of women, held back from each other by the machinations of history and by incomplete understandings of each other. When you open a book by Martha Southgate, be prepared for a shock to your system. She is the type of author who prepares us for the ultimate in life, love, death, and reading pleasure. Through these women's lives, we participate vicariously on nearly eighty years of racial conflict and struggle. Each of them chooses a different path, indeed a different way of looking at the world. Which one do you identify with? But most of all, we enjoy her style. Just to give one example, when Tam moves to NY from LA, she can't get used to the constricted streets. NYC seems small. "Well, not small," she recollects. "Big yet cramped, like a Great Dane in a ten-pound potato sack." Can't you just feel the city wiggle?

This novel follows the stories of three different generations of African-American women: Angie, headstrong and beautiful, flees from Tulsa to LA in the early 70s; her mother Mildred, who was always so strict with Angie but who holds onto her own surprising secrets; and Angie's daughter Tamara, who struggles financially through film school. None of them had good relationships with their own mothers. They each in their own way escape through the medium of film. The novel was easy to read and fast-paced. Southgate has obviously done her homework, particularly about the Tulsa riot in 1921 and the 1970s blaxploitation films, but the information is weaved effortlessly into the narrative. The story is believable, the characters memorable, and the writing superb. Unlike other reviewers, I do not think she is trying to cover too much in one book and I certainly cannot understand how anyone would find this book boring or too slow. Perhaps my opinion will change after reading her first novel. If you haven't read Southgate before, start with this one.

I was deeply moved by this story centered around three generations of women, all connected by blood and their love of movies. Angela leaves home at a young age to pursue a movie career that never really happens. Her daughter Tamara also has a love for film and attends film school. Tamara films everything around her. Tamara doesn't know her family or her father. She is left confused as to why Angela never answers her questions about where she comes from or just who her father is. The only family Tamara has ever known is her mother and her lover Sheila. When Angela's mother Mildred becomes ill, she returns home with Tamara. Tamara meets her mother's family for the first time. When Mildred recalls the stories from the past Tamara catches it on film. Through her Grandmother, family secrets and tragedy are exposed. This was a very engaging and satisfying read. The characters were well defined and I was easily able to connect with them. I highly recommend this novel. A wonderful story of family. Reviewed by Dawnny Mahogany Media Review Albany, N.Y.