Introduction

In 1975, Tempestt Saville and her family are chosen by lottery to "move on up" to Lakeland: one square mile of sparkling apartment towers and emerald lawns where the Black elite live sheltered from the ghetto by a ten-foot-tall, ivy-covered wrought-iron fence.  Eleven-year-old Temmy doesn't enjoy the privilege, however, and thinks Lakeland is the "kingdom of the drab."  Instead, she is drawn to the vivid world outside the fence: to 35th Street, where the saved and the sinners are both so "done up" you can't tell one from the other.  Tempestt's curiosity soon leads her down a dangerous path, however, and after witnessing the death of a friend, she sets into motion a chain of events that will send 35th Street up in flames.

Editorial Review

A secret lies at the heart of Only Twice I've Wished for Heaven, a coming-of-age story by first-time novelist Dawn Turner Trice. Set in Chicago in the mid-1970s, Ms. Trice's novel details several months in the life of Tempestt Rose Saville, an 11-year-old girl transplanted from her beloved southside neighborhood to Lakeland, an upscale oasis surrounded by urban wasteland. The price one pays to live in this "one square mile of ivory towers, emerald green grass, and pruned oaks and willows," is to join the black bourgeoisie, a class Ms. Turner describes as making "the Stepford Wives look like the rainbow coalition," and "about as individual as curds in white milk."

Tempestt may be young, but she's no fool; she hates the place from day one and soon escapes outside the fence that separates Lakeside from 35th Street, the unreclaimed ghetto outside her window. It is on 35th Street that she meets the novel's second narrator, Miss Jonetta Goode, a woman with a past. The street is also where the seminal event in young Tempestt's life occurs: the death of her school friend Valerie, a girl with one foot on 35th Street and the other in Lakeside. Ms. Turner's novel is well-written and from the heart, but many of its characters and situations seem familiar--the stock inventory of coming-of-age novels. Even the novel's secret fails to resonate--perhaps because the reader has guessed it long before Tempestt herself does.

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