Recovering Charles: Loss In the Backdrop of Katrina

Recovering Charles

Recovering Charles is not a complicated story, nor is it difficult to read, but it is moving because Wright introduces characters from New Orleans who remind Luke that Charles was not only his father, but a better man than his son might have thought he was. Verses, the New Orleans juke joint in the story, has become Charles’ home, not only a physical place, but a family place, and that family became a bond in place of his natural family. Recovering Charles ties both families together, and it has some twists and an ending that might surprise you.

While I do not come from what I would consider to be a dysfunctional family, Wright’s thought of a second verse did ring true to me, and I wrote my first novel, The Sex Ed Chronicles, with some remembrances of loss. I lost my mother thirty years ago, but in some ways she isn’t gone.

I wanted a sense of the woman my mother might have been, had she lived to see me graduate college and get my life started. It was not that my mother asked me to write anything before she died, or that I wanted to write something that she would be proud to read. It was because she would have wanted me to be myself, but remember the things, such as family, that are important.  Just as Charles tries to do for Luke in this story.


Contact Stuart Nachbar at http://www.EducatedQuest.com , a blog on education politics, policy and technology or read about his first book, The Sex Ed Chronicle, a novel on education and politics in 1980 New Jersey, at http://www.SexEdChronicles.com .