August 31, 2009
Popular author Forster (A Different Kind of Blues
) charts the course of a young African-American journalist, her love life and her eye-opening trip to Africa. Leticia Langley is a lucky young woman fresh out of college: not only has she landed a job as a food columnist at Washington, D.C.’s The Journal
, she’s been quickly promoted to features reporter. Meanwhile, however, Leticia’s voluptuous “best friend,” her two-faced cousin Kenyetta Jackson, decides to make a play for Leticia’s current crush. While Leticia’s discovering Kenyetta’s betrayal, she’s also overcoming distrust of another potential love interest, Journal
colleague Max Baldwin. An assignment about the roots of obesity in African-American women takes Leticia to Nigeria and Kenya, resulting in a renewal of her career prospects and passions, as well as the novel’s best passages. Though hardly unusual to the genre, Forster puts a fanciful, prerecession gloss on Leticia’s media world that keeps it several steps removed from reality.