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After working for fifteen years as a cafeteria manager in an elementary school, Marsha Cornelius turned in her hairnet non-skid shoes for a bathrobe and slippers. She now works at home, writing novels, acting out scenes with her cats, and occasionally running a Swiffer across dusty surfaces.
Like thousands of others, she thought she could write romance, but soon discovered she was a dismal failure. She did increase her repertoire of adjectives such as throbbing, pulsing, thrumming, vibrating, hammering, pumping . . .
Her favorite writing genre is speculative fiction, where she does manage to work in some steamy scenes.
Reviewed by Carine Engelbrecht for Readers' Favorite
Centered around the theme of homelessness, Losing it All by Marsha Cornelius tells the hard luck stories of two main characters. Frank hides a lifetime of pain and mostly bad memories behind the grimy disguise of a street person. Chloe's delicate veneer of domestic respectability shatters when her husband Duane leaves her to fend for herself and her two small children with the added burden of the debts he ran up before skipping town. Chloe and Frank's paths interweave on parallel downward trajectories, but can a shared struggle against the humiliating circumstances that brought them together lessen their individual burdens? Or will it instead add new complications that will be even harder to overcome?
Losing It All by Marsha Cornelius is a gritty tale set in the 1980s that offers authentic details of the realities of living on the street or in a shelter for the homeless. Along the way, it includes heartwarming moments of triumph - one of which had me in tears - as well as heartbreaking setbacks. The author paints her characters in great detail, but she does not necessarily spare them. Both Frank and Chloe have hard lessons to learn about trust, but they are not necessarily the same lessons. There are finely nuanced examples of how discrimination can work for or against a person on multiple levels. Deep down, both Frank and Chloe are good people who have fallen on hard times and their journey towards recovery may just restore a little of your faith in humanity.
