MADreads

Baltimore childhood

April 10th, 2009 Lesley - Central

Laura Lippman’s latest novel, Life Sentences, is a standalone story of growing up in 1960’s Baltimore.  Writer Cassandra Fallows has achieved critical and financial success with her account of a Baltimore childhood and a follow-up covering her adult marriages and affairs.  For her next book Cassandra sets out to write about a former grade school classmate, Calliope Jenkins.  Jenkins was accused of murdering her son and spent seven years in prison, refusing to answer any questions about the child’s disappearance and presumed death.

Fallows, who is white, tries to reconnect with three former classmates, who are black, to compare memories of Calliope Jenkins.  What Cassandra quickly discovers is that these childhood friends Donna, Tisha and Fatima no longer feel friendly toward her and often have radically different memories of those years.  Cassandra’s research also includes information from a detective and two lawyers who worked the case.  One of them was Reg Barr who is the younger brother of Tisha and is now married to Donna.  This intertwining of life stories makes for a complicated mystery, but eventually the reader learns what happened to Callie’s son and gets a glimpse of her life after the jail term.

Lippman was inspired by a true story of the disappearance of the young boy whose mother also refused to make any statements and therefore spent seven years in jail for contempt of court.  With that as a backdrop Life Sentences portrays a writer driven by ego and memories which often differ from her friends and family in this powerful novel.

Entry Filed under: Mystery