Samai Collins is an active church-going stay-at-home
mother, married to an abusive minister. When they
divorce, and she is left to raise their two children as
well as the daughter she had out of wedlock, she struggles
with being alone. In her struggle, she reconnects with an
old friend from high school, one that she secretly had a
crush on. Despite the voice within that consistently
tries to warn Samai away from people and situations that
are only to her detriment, Samai, who led a relatively
sheltered life, decides to explore some of life's seedier
avenues. In her explorations, her life quickly spirals
downward, as she becomes a drug-addicted, welfare mother.
However, the voice within never leaves her, nor does the
voice of God. NEVER AS GOOD AS THE FIRST TIME chronicles
Samai's descent into the abyss and her rise from the ashes.
In her debut novel, Mari Walker takes the reader deep into
life in the early 1980's when cocaine was king, only to be
displaced by the more virulent crack. She examines how
easy it might be for a steady churchgoer to make some very
bad decisions and the difficulty of climbing out of the
gutter into which those decisions plunge her. At the same
time, Ms. Walker renders a bit of an indictment of the
church, in that church members seem to hardly notice
Samai's absence when she falls away and take little or no
action to find out what's going on with a woman who was
not only a regular attendee but also the wife of one of
their ministers. At the same, it was pleasing that Samai
found the help that she ultimately needed by returning to
her faith.
NEVER AS GOOD AS THE FIRST TIME is a gritty, seamy, no-
holds-barred tale of destruction and redemption. This
story grabs hold of the reader and doesn't let go until
the last word, in part because of curiosity as to just how
far Samai will fall and in part because the reader is
hanging on to see whether Samai will be saved.
In the beginning, Cain slew his brother Abel and destroyed
his ability to think and reason forever preventing him from
being all that he was meant to be.
Many centuries later, coCaine slew the brothers’ Ability
and destroyed their thinking and reasoning forever
preventing them from being all they were meant to be...
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