Third Girl From the Left. Review on Third Girl from the Left - Martha Southgate

Third Girl from The Left by Martha Southgate My friend from Canada was visiting India when I got hold of some books/CD which he had brought for his pastime. He was in Delhi for a short while. I borrowed the CD titled “A Nice Cup of Tea” by Elaine Vail and the Third Girl from the Left by Martha Southgate. Third Girl from the Left is a touching, heart wrenching saga of three generations of women, more alike than they can see, yet separated by worlds of differences. The Edwards women never seem to fit in where they are. Their spirits and hearts somewhere else.

They long for something bigger and better. Angela, the youngest of three, thinks of herself as the most misunderstood of all in the Edwards household. She leaves her mother Mildred and father Johnny Lee to move to Los Angeles to be a movie star. She quickly learns what needs to be done to make it anywhere in the big city in the 1970’s, especially if your skin color isn’t white and you aren’t a man. Bouncing from bed to party to bed, she plays bit roles in movies, usually ending up naked or dead by the end. After a call from Mildred, who saw her naked bar dance in a movie, Angela loses contact with her mother until she (Angela) gets herself pregnant and her lesbian lover Sheila can’t feed the three of them. Angela goes back home briefly, but only feels more of an outcast than she did as a child and returns to LA and raises her daughter Tamara along with Sheila.

Tamara desires to be behind the camera producing instead of in front of it, like her mother, and so moves to New York to attend film school. Never knowing her grandmother or more family than her mother and Sheila, Tamara is shocked but joins her mother to go visit Mildred when she falls ill.

Finally connecting with her roots, Tamara films her grandmother’s stories and learns more about her life than even Angela ever knew. Mildred shares that she is more like Angela than ever revealed and loved Angela more than anyone, even Johnny Lee. After Mildred’s death, Tamara and her mother finally see past their differences, brought together by the old lady’s art, her last gift of love. Martha Southgate has put wonderful emotion and feeling into the pages, so that it comes out of the book and into your own heart. Some sections might be a little illicit, so readers are cautioned.

A must read for mothers and daughters, but with plenty of tissues. --- Prad Ratnaparkhi 1 November 2005