2016 - William Morrow
352 pgs.
Goodreads rating: 4.07
Adult CRF/Mystery
Finished 3/8/16
Setting: Contemporary Atlanta, and other places around the country - a traveling mama
First line/s: "I was born blue. If my mother hadn't pushed me out quick as a cat, I would have been born dead and even bluer; her cord was wrapped tight around my neck. She looked at my little blue lips, my blue toes and baby fingers, and named me after Kali. Kali Jai."
My comments: I have definitely become a Joshilyn Jackson fan. Her story-weaving gets better and better with each book. She flips back and forth between Kali/Paula at 12 and currently, where we slowly learn/guess her background story. What great characters! Her protagonist has so many flaws - making her so real - that you love her and hate her and question her... keeps you busy throughout the whole novel! I listened to this one, her brand new book. I usually greatly enjoy her reading, but the voices she used on this one, other than Cali, Kai, and Birdwine, were a little bothersome. She made her 23-year old brother sound around 12, and I had to keep resetting his image in my mind because of this. Very engrossing.
Goodreads synopsis: Born in Alabama, Paula Vauss spent the first decade of her life on the road with her free-spirited young mother, Kai, an itinerant storyteller who blended Hindu mythology with Southern Oral Tradition to re-invent their history as they roved. But everything, including Paula’s birthname Kali Jai, changed when she told a story of her own—one that landed Kai in prison and Paula in foster care. Separated, each holding her own secrets, the intense bond they once shared was fractured.
These days, Paula has reincarnated herself as a tough-as-nails divorce attorney with a successful practice in Atlanta. While she hasn’t seen Kai in fifteen years, she’s still making payments on that Karmic debt—until the day her last check is returned in the mail, along with a cryptic letter. “I am going on a journey, Kali. I am going back to my beginning; death is not the end. You will be the end. We will meet again, and there will be new stories. You know how Karma works.”
Then Kai’s most treasured secret literally lands on Paula’s doorstep, throwing her life into chaos and transforming her from only child to older sister. Desperate to find her mother before it’s too late, Paula sets off on a journey of discovery that will take her back to the past and into the deepest recesses of her heart. With the help of her ex-lover Birdwine, an intrepid and emotionally volatile private eye who still carries a torch for her, this brilliant woman, an expert at wrecking families, now has to figure out how to put one back together—her own.
The Opposite of Everyone is a story about story itself, how the tales we tell connect us, break us, and define us, and how the endings and beginnings we choose can destroy us . . . and make us whole. Laced with sharp humor and poignant insight, it is beloved New York Times bestselling author Joshilyn Jackson at her very best.
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