GETTING OUR BREATH BACK

Three African-American sisters navigate the hostile world of men and drugs in a first novel set in North Philadelphia during the late1960s and ’70s.

Philly suffers from gang violence, racial tension, Vietnam War fallout, and drug infestation as the sisters battle to support each other through the grief of losing their father to lung cancer. Tired, pretty Violet has two teenaged boys and a philandering husband who brings her only misery; sculptor and single mother Rose changes bedfellows like shoes because of lingering pain over the early breakup with the abusive Charles; drug-addicted Lilly turns tricks and floats through her brief life without purpose. In alternating chapters that meander murkily throughout the years, the sisters’ stories are narrated in the third-person, although Rose lends an overall cohesion in intermediate chapters called “Studio Time.” She meets writer Charles when she’s 17, during the tumultuous Revolution Now! and Black Power movements, while Lilly first shoots up heroin with her boyfriend as a freshman at Temple University. Violet sublimates her own will to successful, overbearing Jerome and middle-class comforts, only to ask herself later, “At what price being pretty and keeping quiet?” The mid-1970s women’s movement brings joy in the form of a loving new man in Rose’s life, but it’s threatened by Charles’s sudden, inexplicable insistence that he wants to see his eight-year-old daughter Imani. At the same time, more tragedy arrives in Lilly’s tortured existence. Johnson etches bitterness into these stories, hints of anger at the way her characters allow men to determine their fates, and yet she evinces enormous sympathy and tenderness as well. But her tendency to propel her narrative in the progressive tenses while loading up on ungrammatical constructions grinds down the reader and makes for a monotonous voice.

A rawer Waiting to Exhale, punctuated by powerful human moments despite run-together, derivative prose.