I'm Telling
By Karen Quinones Miller

Simon & Schuster. 226 pp. $23.

Reviewed by Susan Balée

This second novel by the author of Satin Doll is an urban fairy tale, a rollicking and robust tale of incest and love, sister and mother bonds, career success, and the lure of the streets. It features a wicked stepparent, a prince, and a family secret. But this is no ordinary fairy tale: It's much more sensual. A whole lotta hot sex, good food and spirituous liquors animate the main characters. Miller knows, of course, that every sensual pleasure has its painful underside - incest and prostitution, obesity, crack addiction - and she's not afraid to explore those, too.

Mainly, this is the story of the Freemans of Harlem, of Miss Irene the matriarch and her twin daughters, Faith and Hope. Faith and Hope both love Miss Irene and, at age 29, they're still in thrall to her. After all, Mommy doesn't take any guff from her children: "And don't you suck your teeth at me. I'm still your mother, you know." Miss Irene presides over her brownstone, her boarders, and her children with wit and wickedness. At 400 pounds, she rarely leaves her bed, but her daughters come to fix her pork chops and "smothered" chicken, and her crackhead boarder Tina serves as messenger pigeon and yes-woman.

Miss Irene is a charmer when she wants to be, but she's also in a state of denial about the emotional pain she inflicted on her daughters in their childhood, pain whose consequences are only too evident in one twin's crack addiction and prostitution and the other's perfectionism. Faith told her mother a secret when the twins were 11 - that their stepfather was raping Hope - but her mother didn't want to hear that secret. Hope was punished, the stepfather was forgiven, and Faith ran away. Twenty years later, the wound is still festering, but Miss Irene is too caught up in memories of herself to notice. "Oh, I was 'Miss It' back in those days," she reminisces. "Folks used to compare me to Diahann Carroll - of course I was much lighter than her and had freckles... . Some women just let themselves go when they get big, but not me. I've always gotten stares from men when I walk down the street."

Hope cannot confront her mother about the past; instead, she seduces Miss Irene's boyfriends, earning her mother's rage ("that heifer"), while slowly destroying herself with crack. Faith is torn between her love for her mother and her love for her sister, but it's getting harder and harder to keep them together. This novel rolls toward the explosive moment when the lid is blown off the simmering cauldron of the past but, unlike in a fairy tale, the story doesn't end there. The truth, it turns out, doesn't set you free. It just gives you the key to the prison door. What you do after that is up to you.

I loved the women characters in I'm Telling - Hope, Faith, Miss Irene, Tina, they all sounded like flesh-and-blood women. The evil stepfather, Papa, was also well drawn, but the dream-boat Henry Prince, Faith's beau, is just too good to be true. In a book about faithless men and the women who love them, this dude seems like a brother from another planet. (Despite that, I expect to see him played by Morris Chestnut, with Vivica A. Fox as Faith, in the movie version.)

Overall, I enjoyed this novel tremendously. It's a fast read with lively and likable characters. The Freeman women are hot-blooded in every way: They love their men and they're tight with their sisters. Do them wrong and expect a fistfight. After all, as Henry says, "Y'all are the craziest women I've ever met."