Noah is a heartbreaking saga about Tiffany Mitchell's often difficult journey to find love. From the start, Tiffany Mitchell's road to love took her through dramatic twists and turns that left her thinking that love would be forever out of her reach. In fact, for many years love seemed elusive, like a never-ending pathway to certain disappointment until Tiffany meets a handsome bartender named Noah Crawford and, she falls in love at once. The special event gave Tiffany an immediate attraction to the undisputed possibilities of love, in a moment that would change her whole life. This love raised the bar for others; only, it couldn't have happened at the worst time, for on the eve that Tiffany meets the "Love of her Life" Noah; it is one day before her wedding day to Piper. Will Tiffany have to walk away from the only man she loves? Or, will she lose it all in one night? Carol Denise Mitchell is one of the few authors who work harder than anyone to pull at those heart strings. In the end, readers will be rooting for love. However, will Tiffany ever end up with Noah? Or, will she lose him forevermore?
Noah is about a child, a woman, looking for love. What love was, it was quite obvious she didn't know, any more than the rest of us. Tiffany was from a large family with a single parent. Her mother worked continuously to provide for her family, which meant that she had little time for individual attention for simply being a mother and teaching them about things they needed to know as they grew. Luckily, until she died, Tiffany had her grandmother with whom she felt she could share anything... That helped her through her early years of school... And, fortunately, Tiffany always met at least one girlfriend with whom she was able to share her secret thoughts...
The story is written in first-person and reads like the main character is sharing her life story with us. Like any woman who meets with her girlfriends, and they spend hours talking and often repeating what it is that has inspired their latest emotions... Do you remember the first little boys who you had a crush on? Mine were named Jimmy and Dale and we were in grade school. So, yes, I could empathize quite easily as Tiffany talked about a little boy, Kenneth, who wore a bow-tie, and was dropped off to school in a large black car. (Would you believe that my "first true love" was also named Kenneth!)
Tiffany was devastated when she learned that her friend's family had moved... He had never gotten to see the new dress her grandmother had bought for her, which also had a little bow-tie at the top. She had worn the dress four days straight so he would see it and nobody knew why...
Tiffany was a competitive girl, and decided aggressively that when she was attracted to a boy, she was going after him. In many ways, she had developed a confidence that was perhaps beyond her years, maybe because of being in a large family with older children...
Her first puppy love, which she later learned how to differentiate, was sweet. But when she got to be older, she discovered things changing in her body, and she became what you might call obsessed with a fine young boy in her class... Her pursuit included paying a bribe to another girl so Tiffany could sit right behind him... Soon he was hooked up with a cheerleader...and she was still paying the little girl for the rest of the year... Bummer! This love thing was not going as well as she thought it would...
And then her first kiss... which was just that, with no ties to it whatsoever... Funny how our memories remember "the act" as opposed to the one who gave it...after all it was our first kiss...
But nobody told her that she would be in the minority, and ridiculed, for still being a virgin in her school... She accidentally responded at a assembly one day and she and three other girls just automatically raised their hands. All the other girls were white; Tiffany the only black...After the ridicule that came and the losing of friends, she was out to "save her reputation" in the hood. Sad to say...
A pretty girl is often bombarded with offers of "love" relationships, but when Dean asked, she accepted immediately, to rid herself of the shamed virgin title, until she learned he was married... This story ends in a tragedy...sadly...
Before long, she had graduated and her mother told her she would have to leave home and make a living for herself... Although she was an intelligent girl and her goal was to go into real estate, she was not immediately prepared... She started dancing in bars...And seeing this fine sister, naturally, King Walker, the local Pimp, came around... Their relationship was quite unique... and I understood why Tiffany got involved...until he was murdered in front of her...
Tiffany went from one guy to another, most of them chasing her. And she was a special woman because they all fell in love with her... But the last one, he had wanted marriage almost immediately. But she kept him hanging...until he took her to meet his family... There it was made clear what would happened if Tiffany ever hurt their kin... Tiffany was facing issues that were too tough to handle on her own...
But on the night before the wedding, while her dancing fool stayed on the floor, Tiffany went to the bar for her favorite drink... a coke with a cherry. Noah served her that night...
No matter who you are, you will be pulled in by Carol Mitchell's story of Noah. But does True Love Never Die? Perhaps many of us can never answer the question. But, also, many of us will know, as readers, that the search for True Love may never happen. What was Tiffany to do when she felt she had truly fallen in love on the night before her "shot-gun" wedding? About that time, I was looking at the picture of Noah and thinking he was might fine... Could I deal with the potential danger of backing out of a wedding?
Mitchell includes some important issues in her book--not as a counselor, but as to how she saw each of the issues: education, prostitution, drugs, and parenting. While having to deal with some bad choices, she never once lost sight of the importance of these goals she had set for herself...and learned from them...
Mitchell is a storyteller that uses her personal experience upon which to build her novels. I suppose the story would fit into Urban Fiction...but it is more a biography of a woman searching for love, including in the wrong places. It reads very much like a diary that she has kept since grade school and the content matures along with her as she becomes older. It is intimate, revealing and yet a story that fills you with the possibilities... With a totally satisfactory ending! Teens through adults will enjoy Tiffany and Noah's story... Check it out!
