My Amazon and Goodreads review of Truth Like Oil by Connie Biewald (Rating 5) – Thoughtful, Deep, Honest. Connie Biewald proves in her thoughtful, deep, and honest novel Truth Like Oil, the Haitian proverb that “Truth, like oil in water, rises to the surface.” We meet Nadine Antoine, a Haitian immigrant who is the single mother of two teenage sons, and the Boston-area friends who replace the family she left behind. Nadine’s big secret is that her sons have different fathers, neither of whom the boys have met. She has devoted herself to raising them alone, on her small salary as an aide in a nursing facility, where she cares for a once-feisty white woman felled by a stroke. Nadine frets about her capabilities as a mother, her children’s well-being, romantic overtures from her patient’s son who was also the boys’ high school coach and mentor, memories of an uncle’s abuse, and loneliness. Her sons navigate their own push-pull worlds. For the older son, this means deciding whether he can accept a white girlfriend; for the younger son, resolving a debate between aligning himself with his drug-dealing friends or choosing the respectable future his mother envisions. As a fiction writer myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I admire Biewald’s deft interweaving of opposing forces: old and young, Haitian and American, mainstream and marginal. Biewald strings together three phrases — I love you. I’m sorry. Thank you. — and astutely observes that they say it all. I loved this book, was sorry to reach the end, and thank Biewald for a compelling story.
