Reads Like A Biography

From the Black Issues Book Review site, Antionette Dykes reviews Third Girl From the Left by Martha Southgate.

Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1970 is not a place a smart black girl wants to linger.' So begins Third Girl From the Left by Martha Southgate. It is a wonderful 'back-in-the-day' narrative filled with biting, perceptive prose that reads in a melodic and thoughtful way and comes out as well-composed sheet music filled with many beats.

The fictional story hinges around 20-year-old Angela Edwards, who moved from Tulsa to Los Angeles in the 1970s to begin an acting career. Southgate writes with all of the wit and wisdom of an insider as Angela tries to navigate through live, love and Hollywood--sometimes in a Playboy bunny outfit. The author explores many sides of her main character with titillating honesty, humor and pain.

The book is set against the shroud of the blaxploitation film era, and the author skillfully incorporates actual people and events, using such real-life characters as Pam Grier, Wilt Chamberlain and Huey Newton. True events such as the Tulsa Race Riots add to the credibility of the story. In many scenes of the novel, there is an underlying musical score such as Sly and The Family Stone playing on a stereo at one of the wild '70s parties.

Third Girl From the Left reads like a biography, and that is really what is so impressive about the book. Southgate is wonderful at weaving Angela's memories from the past, and juxtaposing these memories to the present, which is actually the past. This novel is full of honest, multifaceted, tangible characters, and the author intertwines the memories of different characters from different generations into one solid mass. These characters come across as not forced, and the dialogue is playful and interesting.

Southgate does what a good novelist should do: she takes you on a journey to see life through someone else's eyes, allowing you to be a fly on the wall in their story, and just perhaps gives you room to empathize enough to contemplate on your own journey in life. Southgate is a former magazine editor and newspaper reporter who has written two award-winning novels, Another Way to Dance, (Laura leaf, January 1998) for young adults, and The Fall of Rome, (Scribner, January 2003), for adults. She is also a gifted storyteller.