"I’ve read this 2-3 times and it’s beautiful and immersive every single time. For the negative reviews that mentioned she should have had her leg amputated and taken chemo, It’s always so easy to judge another from the outside looking in, isn’t it?"

"Full disclosure: The author was once my creative writing professor and briefly mentored me as I wrote my first novel. That being said, I can't believe it took me so long to read his first novel, published two years before I was born. It's not an easy book to find in print, and I think that's a real shame, because this is an important book.
It mixes tragedy and comedy deftly as it follows Oliver, a young man struggling with his identity as a black man and his sexuality. He lives with two widows-- his aunt Harry and her former employer and now companion Mrs. Klein, a wealthy Jewish woman. Neither woman is handling the suicide of Mrs. Klein's son Sargent at all, but this makes the situation ripe for a con artist who claims to be a "warlock" and offers to conduct a séance to commune with the dead son. Chaos ensues, of course.
I highly recommend this book. "

"Another excellent book from McNally Editions. I tagged this book lgbtq and race issues, but that’s not what the book is about, in fact the most remarkable thing about this unusual story is its unremarkable inclusivity. Written by a Henry Van Dyke, a gay Black man, and published in 1965, the Civil Rights era in the U.S., I expected there to be bridge building or insights into race in America, but there’s really none of that. The fact that Oliver, from whose pov the story is told, is a gay Black teenager and that his Aunt Harriet’s employer, Mrs. Klein, is a wealthy, White Jewish woman, aren’t important to the story of a week in the life of this dysfunctional, functioning family of sorts.

The humor comes from the 30 year, oddly co-dependent relationship of the two old widows, Aunt Harry and Mrs. Klein, Oliver’s de facto mothers, who bicker, banter, battle, support and praise each other, they are each other’s most loyal confident and the bane of the other’s existence all in the same conversation.
The other characters, Mrs. Klein’s son Jerome, his wife Patricia Jo, and the sex crazed cook, Della, who cannot understand why she fails in her attempts to seduce the poetry loving Oliver, bring added humor as the supporting cast.

When the two old women invite to the house Maurice le Fleur, a self-styled warlock, to conduct a seance in order to contact Sargent Klein, the beloved elder son who five years earlier committed suicide in NYC, Oliver alone is determined to protect the women, Della included, from this obvious con man, which lands Oliver in some outrageous situations.

I recommend this book, it’s touching, funny, a little heartbreaking, but mostly it is very entertaining."

"I found this gem when I was in 7th grade. I was a chubby girl who loved to read, but never really connected to the characters. It was the summer I lived with my father and he decided to make me diet. I ate twice a day, and was not allowed to go to friends or families parties because there might be food there. I immersed myself in books and I found this one in the discard pile at the local library. I was allowed to go to the library because there wasn't food there. The book was going to be discarded and I asked if I could have it. I read this book three times that summer. When I moved out in September, my father burned all my things, including this book. I searched for it at other libraries and soon forgot about it. Last year I found it online and purchased it again. Twenty six years later, I still love this story!

I read this again and it still touched me in a way that I can't explain except by saying I felt seen. This was the first book that I felt was a representation of me. As I read it 36 years after I read it originally, I still felt that same feeling of being seen. This is why representation matters. "