OUR SPOONS CAME FROM WOOLWORTHS
By Barbara Comyns. (New York Review Books, 196 pages, $14.95.)
Originally published in 1950, "Our Spoons Came From Woolworths" is the story of the marriage of two young artists in postwar London. They are talented, naive and very, very poor.
The narrator, Sophia, hopes that "if you controlled your mind and said 'I won't have any babies' very hard, they most likely wouldn't come."
But come they do, and along with them come hard times: deep poverty and near-starvation.
It is Sophia's voice that makes this book work so well — measured and calm, self-deprecating, baffled yet optimistic, slowly maturing as the novel goes on.
LAURIE HERTZEL
Senior editor/books
RESPECT: THE LIFE OF ARETHA FRANKLIN
By David Ritz. (Back Bay Books, 482 pages, $23.99.)
If you like your music stars complicated and contradictory, you will praise the Aretha Franklin who emerges in "Respect."
In David Ritz's unauthorized biography, newly issued in paperback, the Queen of Soul is a moody genius with a heaven-sent musical gift, strange and brilliant, hot and cold, passive and bossy, industrious and unreliable, imperious and insecure, a national celebrity with plenty of secret pain.