Some People, Some Other Place

(Hardcover)-J. California Cooper returns with a sweeping novel about love and heartbreak, perseverance and luck, telling her tale with an insight and grace that reaffirms Alice Walkeras words of praise for her previous works: aHer style is deceptively simple and direct and the vale of tears in which her characters reside is never so deep that a rich chuckle at a personas foolishness cannot be heard.a In her acclaimed novels and short stories, J. California Cooper has created moving portraits of people striving to make their way in a hard, often unjust world. Whether it explores the blatant racial and class biases of nineteenth-century America or the more subtle forms of discrimination that exist today, aIt is the universality of her themes that has made Ms. Cooperas work popular,a as the Dallas Morning News has written. Some People, Some Other Place is Cooperas biggest, most far-reaching novel to date. A multigenerational tale, it is set in a town called aPlace,a on a street named aDream Street.a In the words of the novelas narrator, athe block surely had about it a feeling of long accumulation of history, of life, of many lives intertwined.a As she chronicles the interlocking lives of the residents of Dream Street, Cooper places the stories of the individuals and their families within the wider context of Americaas social and economic history. We meet the narratoras great grandparents, who left the poverty of the Deep South in 1895 and made their way to a farm in Oklahoma; her grandparents, who continued the northward journey with their eyes on the promised jobs of the industrial Midwest but were forced to settle without reaching their goal; and her mother, who finishes the journey and discovers that life at 903 Dream Street carries new burdens as well as rewards. The neighbors on the block are people of all colors, all striving to overcome personal troubles and disappointments, and all holding fast to their dreams of a better life.