God Only Knows

by: Xavier Knight

Published by: Grand Central Publishing

Reviewed By Michele E. Davis

Catapulted between the late 1980s and 2008, Knight focuses on four African-American women who attended Christian Light high school, in Dayton, Ohio. They were: Cassandra, Julia, Toya, and Terry. Cassandra and her pretentious, wealthy family are terrorized by Detective Whitlock, who wants to get to the bottom of what happened that fateful day in the ”˜80s when his brother was maimed and will always be on life support.

You know that someone was assaulted, that’s why Cassie is scared, but the dialogue between her and her husband Marcus, and her other friends is so stilted that it seems unreal.

Racial tensions are constantly brought up because Cassie can “pass” as white, but author Knight never quite gets there. He just scratches the surface of racial tensions in Dayton, and the reader is left hanging desiring better dialogue and some real traction with racial issues. Black men always dating white women and how that makes black women feel: angry. But is angry enough? No. We never see what these women truly feel for the men they grew up with and are now subjected to dealing with constantly because of the web of lies they created in their high school days to cover up a sexual assault–by an angry white boy, Eddie Walker. Walker was treated like crap by brother, now Detective Whitlock.

Our other obvious racial tension is white Detective Whitlock and Cassie, who is verbally threatened by this vengeance-seeking detective. He tells Cassie, “Just relax, and accept that your comfortable little life is about to change.” She’s scared of the threat, but she keeps it to herself and we never gets to know Cassie as a frightened, vulnerable woman trying to hold it all together–we just see her stoic exterior.

The book would have been top-notch with better dialogue, the plot not handed to us in the first couple of chapters and a real discussion about how Caucasians and African-Americans really interact and how that makes both ethnicities feel.

I don’t think Knight’s calling is Christian fiction. I didn’t believe that anyone in this book believed in God as they came across too selfish and self-absorbed.

Armchair Interviews says: Xavier Knight is the Christian fiction pseudonym for C. Kelly Robinson.

Authors Web site: http://www.ckellyrobinson.com