Book Review: BeatNikki’s Café
BeatNikki’s Café. Renee James,
Amble Press (2023), Paperback and eBook, 285 pages.
Reviewed by Paula Mikrut.
Nikki Finch is the owner of BeatNikki’s, a café near Lincoln Park in Chicago. As a transgender woman, Nikki accepts that her life is always going to be challenging. But it is the summer of 2017, Trump is president, and right-wing extremists have been encouraged to display their bigotry loudly and often. When her business partner, Little John, is attacked behind the café, Nikki defends him, blinding the attacker in one eye. This sets off a wave of threats and attacks, and employees start to leave, in fear for their safety.
Then Nikki’s ex-wife, Blythe, tells Nikki that their daughter, Morgan, will have to stay with her for the summer while Blythe travels to New York for a cancer treatment that has a slim chance of saving her life. Morgan hasn’t spent more than a day in Nikki’s company since childhood, and Nikki not only needs to find a way to co-exist with her daughter for the summer, she needs to learn how to be a parent in case Blythe dies.
Morgan doesn’t make it easy. She has been taught to despise the woman she still thinks of as “Dad” for abandoning her and her mother and transitioning to a woman, and everything Morgan does seems calculated to demonstrate her contempt. She is also grieving her mother’s impending death and shows it by lashing out at Nikki.
As if this wasn’t enough, property values around the café are skyrocketing, and Nikki is pressured by a couple of real estate developers to sell her building and move the business. One of the developers asks Nikki out, and they start dating, but Nikki can’t help but wonder whether his interest is real or designed to help him close a sale.
BeatNikki’s Cafe made me feel like I was right in the middle of Nikki’s life. I felt the pressure coming at her from every direction; instead of just living her life as anyone would want to do, she has to be on guard constantly, defending herself against the haters and the merely ignorant. She has to question whether everyone she interacts with is friend or foe. She even has to wonder how much she can count on family and friends, whose support should be automatic.
The book is strongest when it is focused on the relationship between Nikki and Morgan. In the beginning, Nikki loves Morgan theoretically—she’s required to love her daughter, isn’t she? She reacts as most of us would to a snotty, privileged fifteen-year-old who is determined to make Nikki’s life unpleasant. She tries to understand all that Morgan is going through and to give her love and support. She tries to give Morgan the freedom to make her own decisions and the guidance to help her make healthy choices. But when Morgan is cruel—as she often is—Nikki reacts with anger. At times, Nikki fantasizes about letting Morgan’s grandmother (who Nikki describes as too mean to get into hell) raise Morgan. Their journey toward a relationship based on mutual love and respect is messy, real, and one we can all empathize with.
In dealing with the very real threat of violence against her, her daughter, and her employees, Nikki has to ask herself how far she’s willing to go to protect the people she cares about and to stand up to hatred. To Nikki, this is a life-and-death struggle, and the easy answer is that she is willing to do whatever it takes to eliminate this threat. She sneers at the people around her who want to run and hide. But the closer she gets to taking action, the harder her choice becomes. She realizes that her crusade could hurt innocent people, and that the people around her will be affected by what she does and doesn’t do.
As Nikki comes to understand, there are no right answers, but “some wrong answers work better than others.”
This is the first of Ms. James’ books I’ve read, but it won’t be the last.