The author recounts her childhood with a comfortable middle-class lifestyle that came from a very unconventional source: her mother ran a cottage betting business that used results from horse races as the "numbers" that customers could bet on. These games were once a common hobby of black communities, and were in their waning decades as Mrs. Davis kept hers going. This was a fun and occasionally dramatic memoir about the young author spending much of her life trying to reconcile this very illegal practice with the security and independence that her mother could provide with it. In that sense, I found it similar to Dilla Time as an important contribution to books chronicling everyday life in Detroit, this one a little earlier with most chapters set in the 1960s and 1970s. ( )

From the late 1950s onward, Davis' mother Fannie built a business in the Numbers--the illegal lottery game.

It's a fascinating story of entrepreneurship and the role of the Numbers in the community. By the time I was growing up, well after New York had established a lottery, numbers were known to me only as something that appeared in news stories about the Mafia. I was unaware of its history in the black community, and Davis does an excellent job of explaining it, especially within Detroit. The Numbers kept the Davis family afloat, but stability was never assured, and class barriers within the black community still existed. Meanwhile, around them, Detroit was beginning its slow decline. Fannie was able to keep her family materially comfortable, but was unable to buy everything for her children. ( )

This combination memoir of a woman growing up in 1960s Detroit, and biography of her mother, who supported the family by running a numbers operation out of the family home, suffers badly from its dual focus.

Fannie's story alone would have been utterly compelling -- how a young wife and mother transplanted from Nashville in the 1950s found a way to survive and thrive has drama and daring and verve.

Her daughter's story -- that of growing up spoiled and indulged in an African-American household at a time when many of her peers dealt with very different issues -- is also an unusual tale, and has its own charm.

But trying to mix the two thins the focus of each.

At bottom, the most compelling component of the book is its revelations about the shadow economy of the African-American community, much of it financed by the illicit "numbers" game which ultimately morphed into legal, state-sponsored lotteries. It's a valuable portrait of a particular time and place in American history, and as such, well worth reading.

As the story of a young woman growing up and coming to terms with her relationship with her mother, it is less singular and therefore less compelling. ( )

A daughter's loving biography of her mother, a mother who happened to be a numbers runner in 1960s and 1970s in Detroit. Her business afforded them a middle class lifestyle but was always in danger of being revealed since it was illegal. There are nuggets of empowerment: Fannie kept her own bank and collected her own numbers at a time when the "biz" was dominated by Italian mafia and/or black men. She was generous (sometimes to a fault) and a good mother. It is a great look at Detroit before and after the riots and the rise of black political power, Still, Fannie was a flawed person (her ex-husband and son spent a winter without heat while she was "rich"). And this white, middleclass reader wanted Fannie to create a college fund, not buy her daughter a new hotrod. Of definite history to Detroiters and those interested in the numbers business (still a real deal as an alternative to the daily lottery). ( )