732 minutes+ 135 minutes =

867 minutes.

The Red Rose Box by Brenda Woods.

Leah Jean receives for her birthday both a red-rose covered overnight box "of femininity" and tickets for her family to visit Aunt Olivia, whom she has never met, in Los Angeles. Her life is never the same, after she discovers that the Jim Crow laws and attitudes of her Louisiana home are not universal. Yet she must reconcile the new world that has opened up to her with the Louisiana that is home, a part of her- particularly when she is forced to make her home in that new world.

Wow. Unique, believable characters (including a little sister that will argue with a big sister's proposition one second and the next turn around with a "me too."), complex story line with many themes: liberation from a land of oppression, paradoxically longing for that land because it is, after all, home, grief, reconciliation, all the best of being part of a family with the not-so-great parts left intact too...there is so much.

On the most basic level- there is something universally attractive about the rags to riches story. This is probably why just about every culture has its own version of "Cinderella."

Simple language describe details that ring true: the giggle happy married people share, the way children tell other children seated at a school lunch table what's what based on what they've experienced. Woods tells us what we already know but have never articulated, and she does it elegantly.

Woods's treatment of religion (mainly Catholicism, with a little of what is presumably evangelical protestantism mixed in) is interesting as well. It isn't reviled or ridiculed, nor is it presented without its inconsistencies. It simply is, sometimes embraced, sometimes rejected, like every other part of who the characters are.

I made more noise during this book than any other I've read so far- laughing out loud at the dialogue, gasping in horror (comes, again, of not reading the book jacket), talking to the characters on occasion.

I loved it.

And found out later it won a Coretta Scott King honor. Not surprised.