Bid Whist at Midnight

'The book opens at the home of Sardis, who invites Grace and Dorcus over at midnight for a card game of bid whist. The women had bonded in college over schoolwork, boyfriends, and card games, but haven't interacted for nearly 20 years. As they play, they take turns revisiting the dark spaces of their pasts, as well as a dreaded event involving their friend Taletha. The women's painful life decisions, traumas and losses unfold through a series of flashbacks, and readers also learn how the tragic early life of Eartha, Sardis' mother, weighed negatively on Sardis' life. The women's stories unpeel like an onion's layers, their life dramas interwoven with and strongly influenced by campus protests, violent police actions, Malcolm X, the black nationalist movement, and the Vietnam War. Overall, Bid Whist at Midnight is a thoughtful, well-developed novel whose characters and their plights stay with you long after the story closes.' BlueInk Review Washington s novel is an epic tale of four friends experiencing the personal and cultural tumult of history as it turns. Sardis, Grace, Dorcus and Taletha meet as students at the historically black South Carolina State College in the late 60s. Each came to the school from vastly different communities and home lives. Sardis light skin gives her advantages in the world at large, although, at first, it gets her shunned by most of her darker-skinned classmates. Grace comes from The Alley, a lower-income neighborhood, while plain-looking Dorcus comes from a stable household with a professional father, but she is trying to gain confidence and find a boyfriend. Taletha s weight and outspokenness make her a bit of an outcast, too. They become friends over the popular card game bid whist, as they share their secrets and struggles while the world around them heaves with racial and gender revolutions. The friends are torn apart by what becomes known as the Orangeburg massacre, a real-life protest at a bowling alley in which three people were killed and many more were injured. Kirkus Reviews Washington tells a good story and she tells it very well. Romance, friendship, love and family obligation-universal topics-serve as ongoing themes, but the real-world situations the characters encounter transcend the fiction. iUniverse