Review: Yada Yada Prayer Group Gets Down, by Neta Jackson

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e-tasana-williams
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Review: Yada Yada Prayer Group Gets Down, by Neta Jackson

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In this book, the second installment of the Yada Yada Prayer Group series, the author Neta Jackson focuses on the theme of forgiveness. As in the first book, most of the story is told from the perspective of Jodi Baxter, third-grade teacher who is recovering from a serious car accident. If the book is a tapestry, then the threads are the life events, families and relationships of the members of the Yada Yada Prayer Group, a motley collection of women who met through a Christian conference earlier in the year (described in the first of the series, The Yada Yada Prayer Group). Jackson sets her tale in Chicago, and does an impressive job of identifying her characters through their speech patterns and dialects. The proper, soft-spoken English of Hoshi, the Japanese college student, Chanda’s Jamaican lilt, and the southern inflections of Adele from Georgia, to name a few. The Yada Yada members that take the forefront in Book Two are Jodi, Adele and Avis, although a traumatic event effects all the members at the climax of the story which challenges them to look at forgiveness in a new light.

What I like best about this book is that it takes an honest look at race relations as well as non-racial prejudices commonly experienced in our country, as well as what it means to forgive and to be forgiven, even as they play out for members of a Christian prayer group. I even found some of my own prejudices challenged, as I held certain images in my mind of some of the characters, and later learned they were different from what I expected. Whether or not Jackson intended that experience for her readers, it made the reading of the book that much more educational from a cultural standpoint. At the same time, I never got the feeling that the author had an agenda of assigning guilt or innocence, perpetrator or victim. The story unfolds in such a way that each perspective is a human one, and each character a portrait of what it might look like to hurt and to heal, to forgive and to be forgiven.

Overall the things I would have changed in this story are minor. A couple of the interactions between the Yada Yada members seemed cliché, and the author wrapped up some of the loose ends too tidily. In what I assume was an attempt to give readers a more satisfying ending, Jackson concluded in a way that was far neater than what tends to happen in real life. But isn’t that what most authors do?

-- May 14th, 2016, 8:28 pm --

I give this one 4 out of 4 stars.
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