Mourning Glory

MOURNING GLORY by Warren Adler
Kensington Books - August 7, 2001
ISBN: 1-57566-899-X -- Hardcover
Contemporary General Fiction
Location: Palm Beach, Florida
Explicit language / racial remarks/ one extremely violent scene / mild sexual content

Reviewed by Jo Rogers, MyShelf.com
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MOURNING GLORY is a hard book to classify. It is a dark romance, with elements of danger and mystery, as well as the social issue of race hatred.

Grace Sorentino is a divorced mother of a sixteen-year-old daughter, Jackie. They live in a rundown apartment building in West Palm Beach, Florida, for Grace can't afford better on her cosmetician's salary from Saks. Life is okay, until Grace gets fired for insulting a customer. She goes home to find her truant daughter in bed with a skinhead named Darryl. Grace explodes and insists that Darryl leave, even though he punches her in
the stomach and threatens her with a knife. Jackie, in all her brain-dead, teenage, knows-it-all wisdom, declares her mother a loser, and says she will continue to see Darryl, no matter what her mother says.

When Grace was fired, her now former boss advised her to find a rich, and preferably Jewish, widower and marry him. Grace thought this deplorable until she got home. Then, she figured it was the only way to rescue herself and Jackie from financial ruin. So she haunted the Jewish funeral home until she found Sam Goodwin, her knight in shining armor.

Adler's portrayal of Grace as a mother is somewhat unrealistic compared to the mothers I know. Mine would never have tolerated such behavior as Grace accepts from Jackie. The skinhead would have been in jail or dead as soon as she came home and found him near her daughter. Otherwise, this is an interesting romance with a strange and twisted ending.