Desiree's Baby C

From Library Journal With contemporary authors such as Robert Antoni, Margaret Cezair-Thompson, and Patricia Powell exploring the rich vein of Caribbean dialects, these stories, which sparkle with Cajun and Creole patois, seem as if they could have been written yesterday. Actually, most of them are a century old. Chopin, revered as an early feminist for her novel The Awakening (1899), is not a major writer, and these bittersweet sketches about the joys and disillusionments of love in Louisiana are fairly slight. They do, however, support the contention that her voice is an interesting one, and the title story, the most effective in the collection, is a searing-and ironic-indictment of racial prejudice. The program is especially entertaining due to narrator Jacqueline Kinlow, who shifts from Southern elegance to a gritty French Creole without missing a beat, avoiding the vocal exaggeration that might have ensnared a lesser talent. Sound Room should be commended for adding these neglected works to its international library of short fiction. Recommended.Peter Josyph, New YorkCopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. Product description A collection of eight of Chopin's best stories of Louisiana, including Desiree's Baby, which is concerned with slavery and racism, and the intriguing story, The Godmother, of a murder and an older woman's attempt to protect the son of the man she had loved. Unabridged