Amazon.com
In The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Roots, Alex Haley showed a masterful talent for dramatizing the triumphs and tragedies of African Americans and their families. This book--the basis for a 1998 CBS miniseries--was "cowritten" by David Stevens after Haley's death in 1992, telling the story of Flora, a black girl born to a sharecropping family in Mississippi who later moves to Memphis, Tennessee, where her husband, Booker, is killed by white landowners. Her son, Willie, moves to Chicago, fights in World War II, and marries, while Flora adopts her niece, Ruthauna, who later goes to college.
Those events in Mama Flora's life span the gap between 1912 and the modern era, and along the way, Haley depicts the Civil Rights-Black Power paradigm that caused disagreements in many black families. But, ultimately what Haley shows through Flora is the undying Afro-American belief in moral justice, and an ancestral drive for freedom that, in the case of Mama Flora's family, is strong enough even to withstand the ravages of drug abuse plaguing contemporary American families. --Eugene Holley Jr.
From Publishers Weekly
Somewhere along the line, the late Haley (Roots) or his collaborator Stevens (Queen) made the calculated decision to sacrifice the warm, personal and often sentimental story of a black sharecropper's life for the more global and sensational sweep of roughly three quarters of a century of African American history. And therein lies just one of the failings of this posthumous novel, which traces the Zelig-like descendants of a larger-than-life matriarch, Mama Flora, from 1920 to the present day. After her young husband, a Tennessee sharecropper, is mortally wounded when caught stealing from white landowners, he makes her promise that their son Willie will get an education. But after Willie drops out of school and is temporarily lured to the fleshpots of Chicago, Flora invests all her energy in her sister's orphan, Ruthana. By the time we see the third generation turn either to drugs or to politics (the Civil Rights movement, the Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam), the novel has lost all sense of proportion and is shipping its characters to every imaginable hot spot in recent African American (or American, or African) history, from HUAC's persecution of the Jewish family for whom Mama Flora works to political repression under Idi Amin. At the same time, Haley and Stevens lose the human touch that animates the novel's first half?the dollar bill sent as a wedding gift, the mother who pretends to be dropping money into the collection plate in order to keep up appearances. As corny and sentimental as the early chapters are, they have something that the latter portion of the novel lacks, and that's credibility. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
YA-This novel treats the same struggle as Haley's Roots, but updates it. From the 1929 stock-market crash through the turbulence of 1968, the history is all there, framed by a fast-paced tale of strong-as-a-fortress Flora, who overcomes all obstacles to keep her family going. In her, readers meet a matriarch who nurtures the many branches of a rural Tennessee black family turned urban. Those who liked Alice Walker's The Color Purple (Harcourt, 1982) and Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Random, 1970) will find themselves caught up in Flora's struggle to keep her three children and their offspring intact through integration. History students will recognize landmarks: Brown v. Board of Education, Rosa Parks and her civil disobedience, the lunch-counter sit-ins, the assassinations, the rise of the Black Muslims, Afros and daishikis in Harlem and Chicago, drugs, and tensions within the Civil Rights movement. Readers who like their history conveyed through compelling narrative and an authentic voice will find this complex novel well worth reading.Margaret Nolan, W. T. Woodson High School, Fairfax, VACopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
When Haley died in 1992, screenwriter Stevens used unfinished material to write Queen (LJ 7/93). This multigenerational family saga is based on more of Haley's writings. The lives of Mama Flora and her family provide a whirlwind survey of the 20th-century black experience. As a young woman in a small Tennessee town, Flora bears a son and sees his father killed at the hands of white racists. She realizes that education is the only way out of poverty. Soon, her daughter becomes a social worker while her son dabbles in communism and enlists to fight in World War II. As Flora lays dying, she can look back on her family and their accomplishments with pride. This novel's sweep seems to have overwhelmed the authors' capabilities; the book's perfunctory prose reads more like an extended treatment for a film script than a finished novel?no surprise, since it is due to be made into a CBS miniseries. Buy only if demand warrants.-?Nancy Pearl, Seattle P.L.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The Boston Globe, Alison Bass
The story of Mama Flora and her family is a powerful one, and it will (as advertised on the book jacket) probably make a great television miniseries. But in reading Mama Flora's Family, the latest novel written by David Stevens but based on the writings of the late Alex Haley, I found myself missing Haley's sure touch.... That said, Mama Flora's Family remains not only a great yarn, but a rare glimpse into how black Americans coped with the blatant segregation of the South before and after World War II.
From AudioFile
Debbi Morgan's smoky voice and versatility do full justice to this engrossing story of a family and the woman who had the strength to overcome poverty, racism and tragedy to give her children the ability to persevere. Flora moves to a Tennessee town after bearing a child of rape and having the child taken away from her. The murder of her sharecropping husband doesn't break her as she struggles to raise her son and adopted daughter. Her will helps her children to have dreams for their futureÐalthough they aren't always Flora's. As Morgan effortlessly switches from character to character, accomplishing difficult dialects and the range of human emotion, the story sweeps the listener along in this saga of American survival. Her rendition of Flora's preacher is priceless: One can see the swaying figure and the sheen of sweat on the forehead during the fiery sermon. We hear Flora's aging in her voice: always determined and strong, but acquiring the patina of age as her story progresses. Both major and minor characters are clearly established vocally. This is a riveting performance that introduces characters the listener will not soon forget. M.A.M. An AUDIOFILE Earphones Award Winner. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine
From Booklist
Alex Haley, author of the much-revered Roots, died in 1992, and now his final work has been finished from notes by coauthor Stevens. A multigenerational saga, its central character is a woman called Flora, originally from Mississippi. In her new home of Tennessee, she meets Booker, who becomes her beloved husband, but he dies in her arms after being shot for stealing cotton so he could feed her and their little boy, Willie. In Willie, Flora invests all her dreams for a better life; when he drops out of school to work, she is devastated. Then he takes the train to Chicago, but he has left a girlfriend behind, whom he eventually marries. Before that happens, though, Flora takes in her orphaned niece, Ruthana, to raise as her own child, and it is Ruthana who fulfills Flora's dreams for a college education. The next generation of Flora's family brings new hopes and disappointments as the civil rights movement and all of its reactions and ramifications affect her grandchildren. But Flora's goodness has its abiding effect on them, too. Haley's attempt to show "the things [that] children do, the journeys they make," may lack for artistry, but it is a heartfelt personalization of social conditions in the black community from the post^-World War I period to the present. Based on Haley's reputation, expect demand. Brad Hooper
From Kirkus Reviews
Screenwriter Stevens (who completed the late Haley's Queen, 1993) has now crafted from another incomplete Haley novel one of those heartwarming generational sagas - destined as a miniseries on CBS-TV in November - that relies on individuals as eyewitnesses to history. Too often, when characters are turned into representatives of the Zeitgeist, they dance to the music of time rather than to the promptings of the heart, and Mama Flora - s Family is no exception, but with one caveat: Mama Flora herself is as memorable a character as Root's Kunta Kinte and Chicken George. The eldest daughter of poor black farmers in Mississippi, Flora is seduced by the son of a wealthy black plantation owner and has to give up her baby and leave the state as a result. A devout Christian, Flora settles in a small Tennessee town, where she is helped by the local preacher to find work. After a brief but loving marriage to Booker, who is murdered by the Klan, Flora is determined that their only son Willie will go to college. But Willie, unlike Ruthana (the niece Flora raises when her sister dies), is no student: He leaves school, but the Depression makes work hard to find, so he heads to Chicago. There, he becomes involved with drug dealers and black communists, then joins the army and fights heroically in the Pacific, only to return to find racial prejudice still entrenched. The times are changing, though, and Flora and her growing family respond in different ways. Some become Moslem, others join the Black Panthers, take drugs, or, like Ruthana, go to Africa. Even Flora does her part, by single-handedly desegregating the local caf. At the reunion for her 80th birthday, the community and her family are all there to honor her. Not in the same class as Roots, but an affecting if superficial take on recent racial history. (Literary Guild alternate selection) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"Heartwarming...affecting...Mama Flora herself is as memorable a character as Roots' Kunta Kinte."
--Kirkus Reviews
"Powerful and moving."
--The Boston Globe
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