"A Study Guide for Nancy Rawles's ""Crawfish Dreams"""

By Gale and Cengage

"A Study Guide for Nancy Rawles's ""Crawfish Dreams"", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Dec 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9780028665870

Book preview

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A Study Guide for Nancy Rawles’s Crawfish Dreams

Nancy Rawles

2003

Introduction

Nancy Rawles's darkly humorous 2003 novel Crawfish Dreams follows the adventures of the Broussard family matriarch, Camille, as she pursues her dream of opening a fine-dining Creole restaurant in the crisis-torn Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts in the 1980s. Alternately helped and hindered by her seven hapless adult children and bedeviled by her ex-convict grandson, Camille relies on her longtime neighbor, Lester Pep, to help keep her dream alive in the face of disappointment, betrayal, violence, and death. Armed with a saucepan, a stubborn streak, and the will to survive, Camille will not give up—not on her restaurant and not on her family, no matter how hopeless each in turn seems. Traumatized by the Watts riots of 1965, her children fear their mother as much as they do the neighborhood she refuses to leave. Though all agree that she must get out, none are willing or able to take her in, to their great shame. Told with deadpan humor and sprinkled with decadent recipes from Camille's kitchen, Crawfish Dreams is the story of one family's struggle to come together amidst the wreckage of a community that has fallen apart. The Broussard family first appears in Rawles's National Book Award–winning novel Love Like Gumbo (1997).

Author Biography

Rawles was born in 1958. She grew up in Los Angeles and attended Northwestern University in Chicago. A novelist, playwright, teacher, and journalist, she published her first novel, Love Like Gumbo, in 1997. Her second novel, Crawfish Dreams (2003), is a stand-alone sequel to Love Like Gumbo, featuring the same cast of characters. Included are Creole recipes by chef Jim Watkins.

Media Adaptations

Crawfish Dreams is available as an audiobook, narrated by Lizan Mitchell and published by Recorded Books in 2008. The run time is eleven hours and eight minutes.

Next Rawles published her award-winning retelling of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, titled My Jim (2005). Her next novel, Miz Sparks Is on Fire and This Ain't No Drill, was published in 2012. She cites her grandfather and mother as her greatest creative inspirations. Her awards include an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, an Alex Award from the American Library Association, and a Legacy Award from the Hurston/Wright Foundation. She lives in Seattle.

Plot Summary

part one: almost spring, 1984

1

Crawfish Dreams begins with Camille Broussard remembering her childhood in Louisiana. She grew up in the countryside, dreaming of one day moving to New Orleans, marrying a stranger, and opening a restaurant. Instead, she moved to the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, where she works in the rectory kitchen of St. Martin de Porres Catholic Church. She married her second cousin, Henri T-Papa Broussard, but he died at her dinner table, leaving her to chase her culinary dreams alone. Her seven children worry about her: Normally, they tried not to worry about anybody but themselves, and they tried especially hard not to worry about their mother, who still embodied the twin virtues of stability and nourishment. They resent that her incredible cooking, which used to be free to them, is