This week’s page features The Girl from the Red Rose Motel, an interview with its author Susan Zurenda, and The Unsettled.
THE GIRL FROM THE RED ROSE MOTEL
by Susan Beckham Zurenda
Published by Mercer University Press (September 5, 2023)
Hardcover $23.60
Kindle $20.00
Reviewed by Drew Gallagher
Susan Zurenda was an English teacher in South Carolina for more than three decades. She taught AP courses and a variety of authors including Toni Morrison whose works have been recently banned from Spotsylvania County school libraries. Zurenda recently wrote a compelling book titled The Girl From The Red Rose Motel, and it is a book that, despite its innumerable merits, would likely be banned in Spotsylvania County school libraries. This is a cautionary tale about books and literature.
There are mature themes in The Girl From The Red Rose Motel just as there are mature themes in the novels of Toni Morrison and in high school hallways and on kids’ cell phones. The novel addresses sex and teen pregnancy. The “sex” scenes are minimalist and are dealt with tastefully (and for anyone to label them “pornographic” is an insult to the fundamental purpose of pornography). But the overriding theme of Zurenda’s book is the problem of sheltered homelessness and how it adversely affects students. It is a topic that should not be denied to students in Spotsylvania schools or anywhere.
Hazel Smalls is the protagonist in Zurenda’s novel and lives in the Red Rose Motel (hence the title) with her kid sister, overworked mother, and alcoholic father. Hazel has no cell phone, but she has an English teacher, Ms. Wilmore, who cares. Ms. Wilmore proves far more important than a cell phone and makes a tremendous difference in this fictional world, and I would speculate that Zurenda, like most teachers, made a similar impact on students in her three decades as a teacher. Hazel’s world is better because of Ms. Wilmore, and the pupil finds a glimmer of life beyond her motel room walls in the faith of her teacher.
In the real world, the job of teacher is becoming more difficult by the year, and though Zurenda said she rarely encountered parental dissent in her English classroom, she believes that some of that is due to her retirement before the recent parental rights movement. There are a few incidents from her career, however, that she still finds galling years later.
I hope my novel brings awareness to the truth that teachers are educated in their disciplines and have the expertise to choose the material that best suits their students to make them mindful of the breadth of the human condition.
“There are two specific situations in The Girl From the Red Rose Motel based on my life as a high school English teacher,” she said in a recent interview with FXBG Advance conducted via email. “One of them is a horrific meeting I endured (along with my principal and the head of the English Department) with a set of parents determined to “oversee” the material I taught in AP English for the “protection” of their daughter. No one had ever challenged my curriculum as these parents did. I was blindsided by their narrow-mindedness and their condescension. Fortunately, the school administration had my back, and I went forward teaching my curriculum as I always had.”
“But the confrontation has stayed with me all these years; I think because this couple challenged my competence. I was always supported by administration at Spartanburg High School, but unfortunately, since I began writing The Girl From the Red Rose Motel, outsiders’ desire to censor books in classrooms and libraries has only intensified, to the point teachers and librarians can face legal consequences and school administrations run scared. I hope my novel brings awareness to the truth that teachers are educated in their disciplines and have the expertise to choose the material that best suits their students to make them mindful of the breadth of the human condition.”
The breadth of that human condition in the Fredericksburg area does include sheltered homelessness and students living out of motels. The problem, obviously, is not as simple as cracking open a book on your couch and highlighting the supposed dirty parts and then complaining to the Superintendent, but it is a problem that seemingly would be one of import to those parents wanting to protect all the children in the area’s schools and not just their own. There are no easy solutions for students experiencing homelessness, but to deny them a possible window into their very own lives via books is to deny them a possible lifeline that was readily available on library shelves until recently.
Even though Zurenda is retired, she sees the situation with book bans worsening.
“I retired from teaching in 2013, and though I and other English teachers I knew faced parental objections from time to time regarding literature we taught, it was nothing like the crisis facing educators now,” she said. “During my first year of teaching way back in 1979, I remember the mother of an 8th grader objecting when I taught A Wrinkle in Time because she thought the book promoted ‘the occult’. I explained that the author Madeleine L’Engle was a Christian who believed in universal salvation, but that didn’t matter.”
“Literature is our greatest teacher of what it means to be human, and it horrifies me to know a minority of parents and community leaders wearing blinders do not want our young people exposed to the expanse of the human condition. Certainly, there are trashy books out there that no normal-thinking adult would want young people to read, but those are not the books in question. Rather, excellent books of literary merit are being removed from our culture.”
There is indeed absurdity in Spotsylvania County. The absurdity rests in the notion that there are students sleeping in motel rooms with sporadic heat and leaking toilets who some parents believe are safer because they are not able to read books by Pulitzer-prize winning authors or books about gay people. Or books about students, just like them, living in some local manifestation of the Red Rose Motel.
Drew Gallagher is a freelance writer residing in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He is the second-most-prolific book reviewer and first video book reviewer in the 136-year history of the Free Lance-Star Newspaper. He aspires to be the second-most-prolific book reviewer in the history of FXBG Advance.
THE UNSETTLED
by Ayana Mathis
Published by Knopf (September 26, 2023)
Hardcover $23.57
Kindle $14.99
Reviewed by Ashley Riggleson
In Ayana Mathis’ new novel, The Unsettled, the reader should never assume anything because this novel goes in some very unexpected directions.
The Unsettled tells the story of a mother and son, Ava and Toussaint, who are living in a homeless shelter in Philadelphia. Ava is fleeing from domestic violence and struggling with some mental health issues. From the outset, Ava attempts to put her life back together, but she is not very successful. Toussaint, in a state of constant instability, unsurprisingly, fails to thrive in these conditions, and he comforts himself by recalling the tales Ava has told him of his grandmother, who lives in an all-Black community in Alabama. Toussaint wants to go there more than anything, but these plans are dashed when Ava unexpectedly reconnects with an old flame, a charismatic man called Cass (Toussaint’s father), who she finds ministering to the homeless.
Instead of going to Alabama (as Ava had finally agreed to do, despite her rocky relationship with her mother), she, Cass, Toussaint, and others move into a house together where Cass has started a commune of sorts. A doctor who has been stripped of his license to practice medicine, Cass hopes to start a free clinic while getting more people to join the cause. In many ways, things at first seem to go better than expected. But the rules and regulations that Cass has put in place begin to sow discontent, and after the police raid their home, Ava begins to have doubts. Cass also becomes increasingly paranoid. What begins as a means to do good morphs into something else entirely.
Meanwhile in Alabama, Ava’s mother, Duchess, fears the loss of her land and community. Readers meet her as a lonely and eccentric woman, who is still reeling from her husband’s murder many years ago, and although Duchess is far from perfect, it is clear she still loves Ava despite their flawed relationship. In these chapters, readers learn about Ava’s back story and begin to see how trauma in Ava’s childhood influences some key decisions later in the novel.
The Unsettled is about homelessness, manipulation, and mother/child relationships, just to name a few, but this novel is, above all, about Ava’s internal conflict. As time passes, things within the commune become ever more sinister, and although Ava has doubts, her love for Cass prevents her from acting on them. She is not, however, blind to the fact that Toussaint is not doing well in this situation, and in the end, Ava must choose between the man she loves and her son.
This fascinating novel is sure to entice many readers. Mathis’ compelling plot and well-rounded characters will keep them turning pages. In the end, The Unsettled is also more poignant than I expected. This novel struck an emotional chord which, to me, means that the author has done her job. I was invested until the last page.
Ashley Riggleson is a freelance book reviewer from Rappahannock County. When she is not reading or writing book reviews, she can usually be found playing with her pets, listening to podcasts, or watching television with friends and family.
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