What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day (Oprah's Book Club)

In a remarkable debut novel that sizzles with sensuality, crackles with life-affirming energy and moves the reader to laughter and tears, author Pearl Cleage creates a world rich in character, human drama, and deep, compassionate understanding. After a decade of luxe living in Atlanta, Ava Johnson has returned to tiny Idlewild, Michigan -- her fabulous career and power plans smashed to bits on one dark truth: Ava has tested positive for HIV. Bur rather than a sorrowful end, her homecoming is a new beginning. Because, in the ten-plus years since she left, all the problems of the big city have invaded the sleepy community of her childhood. Because dear friends and family sorely need her help in the face of impending trouble and tragedy, and Ava cannot turn her back on them. And because, most importantly, Ava Johnson is inexplicabley and undeniably falling in love.

Ava Johnson was living out her dream in Atlanta: fabulous career, high living, and the promise that things could only get bigger and better. Then Ava's future crumbled -- she tested positive for HIV. Believing her life to be over, she returns to Idlewild, Michigan, the small town of her childhood. But home is not what it used to be, and Ava's homecoming is anything but the sorrowful end she expected. Big-city problems have made their way to Idlewild, and Ava finds a new beginning in working with the town's troubled black youths. Oh, and then there's Wild Eddie -- nothing gives a gal a new lease on life like falling in love!

Kirkus Reviews

It takes talent to make a love story between an AIDS victim and a convicted murderer work, but playwright/essayist Cleage (Deals with the Devil) more than meets the challenge in this gutsy, very likable fiction debut.

As a teenager, Ava Johnson couldn't wait to move away from tiny Idlewild, Michigan, a lakefront village originally conceived—and enjoyed for decades—as a resort town for people of color. Now just a half-abandoned dot on the map like any other (except that still, most of its residents are black), Idlewild offers the only safe haven when Ava, now nearly 30, learns she's contracted the HIV virus and is forced to close down her hair salon in Atlanta. Telling herself she's just visiting her older sister, Joyce, for a few weeks before she moves on to San Francisco, sophisticated Ava (whose voice is always feisty and humorous, even when the subject is death) is nevertheless impressed by bighearted Joyce's efforts to help the teenaged girls in her small community. She's also intrigued by handsome, sexily 'together' Eddie Jefferson, a once-wild childhood acquaintance who's returned to Idlewild to raise vegetables, grow dreadlocks, and practice t'ai chi. While giving support to Joyce as she fights her conservative church for the right to teach parenting to adolescents, and assisting (a bit skeptically) when Joyce takes in an addict's abandoned baby, Ava finds herself falling hard for sensitive, nurturing Eddie. Obviously, he's interested, too—but won't he run once he learns she's carrying the virus? Ava hardly dares hope for a final chance at love, even when Eddie reveals his own terrible—and, finally, forgivable—past. Lively, topical, and fantasy-filled. Watch out, Terry McMillan. Cleage is on your tail.

Acclaimed Playwright, essayist and columnist Pearl Cleage breaks new ground in African American women's literature--with a debut novel that sings and crackles with life-affirming energy as it moves the reader to laughter and tears. As a girl growing up in Idlewild, Michigan, Ava Johnson had always heard that, if you were young, black, and had any sense at all, Atlanta was the place to be. So as soon as she was old enough and able enough, that was where she went--parlaying her smarts and her ambition into one of the hottest hair salons in town. In no time, she was moving with the brothers and sisters who had beautiful clothes, big cars, bigger dreams, and money in the bank. Now, after more than a decade of elegant pleasures and luxe living, Ava has come home, her fabulous career and power plans smashed to bits on one dark truth. Ava Johnson has tested positive for HIV. And she's back in little Idlewild to spend a quiet summer with her widowed sister, Joyce, before moving on to finish her life in San Francisco, the most HIV-friendly place she can imagine. But what she thinks is the end is only the beginning because there's too much going down in her hometown for Ava to ignore. There's the Sewing Circus--sister Joyce's determined effort to educate Idlewild's young black women about sex, drugs, pregnancy, whatever. . .despite the interference of the good Reverend Anderson and his most virtuous, "Just say no" wife. Plus Joyce needs a helping hand to make a loving home for Imani, an abandoned crack baby whom she's taken into her heart. And then there's Wild Eddie, whose legendary background in violence combined with his Eastern gentility has stirred Ava's interest. . .and something more. E-book extra: Reading group guide.That one unthinkable, unmistakable thing is happening to Ava Johnson in sleepy Idlewild after a decade of luxe living in Atlanta: she is falling in love. The classic bestseller and Oprah fave is now available in a delightful new e-book edition.After a decade of elegant pleasures and luxe living among the Atlanta brothers and sisters with the best clothes and the biggest dreams, Ava Johnson has temporarily returned home to Idlewild -- her fabulous career and power plans smashed to bits by cold reality. But what she imagines is the end is, instead, a beginning. Because, in the ten-plus years since Ava left, all the problems of the big city have come to roost in the sleepy North Michigan community whose ordinariness once drove her away; and she cannot turn her back on friends and family who sorely need her in the face of impending trouble and tragedy. Besides which, that one unthinkable, unmistakable thing is now happening to her: Ava Johnson is falling in love. On learning she has the AIDS virus, Ava Johnson closes her beauty parlor in Atlanta and returns to her hometown in Michigan, devoting herself to counselling black girls in trouble. In the process she falls in love with a man convicted of murder. A look at the problems facing black youth i'm sitting at the bar in the airport, minding my own business, trying to get psyched up for my flight, and I made the mistake of listening to one of those TV talk shows. Ava Johnson, the owner of a successful hair salon in Atlanta, moves back to her hometown of Idlewild, Michigan when she tests positive for HIV E-book extra: A reading group guide to What looks like crazy on an ordinary day...