Book Review: What You Owe Me

Once again, best selling author Bebe Moore Campell has graced readers with a story complete with betrayal, love, forgiveness…and everything in between.
What You Owe Me is narrated by the spirit of Hosanna Clark who tells of how land is stolen from her family in the south in the 1940’s and how she and her beloved brother Tuney traveled to California to make a new lives for themselves.
Young and carefree, Hosanna becomes a maid at the Braddock Hotel in Los Angeles and meets Gilda, a Holocaust survivor. The two become friends and look past their racial divide. The closer the friends get, the more reluctant decide to go into business together. They use Gilda’s family’s cosmetic formulas. Everything is going well until one day Gilda surprisingly disappears with the meager assets the two have gained. Hosanna is deeply hurt and swears she will get what is owed to her. She goes on through life, marries, has children and dies a bitter woman still full of dreams not yet accomplished.
Her spirit continues to watch over her children and somehow coaxes her oldest daughter Matriece to live out that dream for her.
Matriece is a young, goal-oriented woman who is so set upon getting what is owed to her late mother that she neglects her personal life.
The reader is drawn into the lives of her and other characters, such as Gilda who has resurfaced as Matriece’s boss, the owner of a multi-million dollar cosmetic firm. Matreice’s maternal history is completely unbeknownst to Gilda and she takes the young woman under her wing to teach her to ultimately become her successor.
What You Owe Me is a wonderful novel full of great story telling techniques, a trait of Moore, who has been called “one of the most important African American writers of this century” by the Washington Post. It is surely a page-turner that will keep you interested until the very end.