Ronald John Vierling
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Clementine Camille
Volume  Two

An American Memoir

 

Ronald Vierling’s first novel in the Clementine trilogy, Clementine Camille: Volume one: An American Romance, ends when African-American Clementine Brown and Caucasian-American Tyler Raymond’s twin daughters are six years old.  Clementine Camille: Volume Two: An American Memoir begins nine years later, when the couple’s twin daughters, Josephine and Abigail, are fifteen, which means Clementine and Tyler not only face issues that naturally arise with raising teen-age daughters, they must also deal with those issues that attend their daughters’ mixed racial heritage.  Thus, while An American Romance chronicles how Clementine and Tyler became adults and parents  as well as the story of the family and friends who shaped them, the events that unfold in An American Memoir test everything they have come to believe  about love and loss, about race and identity, about ambition and the sometimes contradictory consequences of achievement.

At the same time, for all of the complex joy An American Memoir details, like An American Romance, the novel also protrays the dynamics of racial prejudice that remain a disturbing but profound factor in American life.  In the end then, An American Memoir is a chronicle of more than just Clementine’s  and Tyler’s relationship; it is the story of the social world we all inhabit, whether we are brave enough to acknowledge that truth or not.

 

 

 

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“A heartening saga about the way of  life, love, and race relations could and ought to be. A novel that dares to ask the question why can’t black and white be the stuff of joy and romance?”

 

Mercedes Douglass

M.Ed. University of Central Florida

 

“This is the most compelling and sensitive and positive story of love and race in America that anyone has written in the last 50 years”

 

P.J. Partlow, M. Ed.

Syracuse University