Once again, Omar Tyree goes where angels fear to tread when it comes to his writing! Sweet St. Louis is a subtle love story set in St. Louis in the springtime of 1999. Just as our lives reflect the four seasons of nature, Sweet St. Louis is about the springtime of Tyree’s characters’ lives and the springtime of their love.

The story opens with the relationship between twenty-seven year old Ant and his best friend, twenty-eight year old Tone, as they cruise the city on a spring day. Enter Sharron Francis. She, too, has a best friend, a roommate, Celena. Each pair of friends are foils of each other. Ant, although young, is practical, level-headed, and centered. Tone is wild, woolly and let- it-all-hang-out crazy. In a parallel story, Sharron Francis, 23, (the recent escapee from a doomed affair with a married man,) is the settled, conservative half in her friendship. Celena is the party-hearty sister, the flyy girl. Ant and Sharron Francis’ different friendships with an opposite-type personality works for them. But it does not work for them in relationships. Unbeknownst to the unsuspecting Ant and Sharron Francis, they are each other’s spiritual half. Through a chance meeting, the two characters discover each other. So they fall madly in love? Wrong. Not in the cynical late 90’s. Both are afraid of being hurt, yet they are ready for commitment. The ensuing arc in their relationship takes the reader on a warmhearted journey to love.

More than just a romance, Sweet St. Louis is a story of the universal longing to be loved. At a time when relationship stories are flourishing in the African American book marketplace, many are not talking about the real, underlying problem. That is, the difficulty of establishing and maintaining a long-term relationship of substance. As author Tyree questions, can you and your mate see yourselves sitting in two rocking chairs on the front porch with gray hair and no teeth, drinking lemonade?

Often young Omar Tyre enters into subterranean territory which many popular writers steer clear of. This time, in a quiet manner, he does the same. "A piece of me for a piece of you," is his protagonist Ant’s signature pick-up line. As his love interest, Sharron Francis, turns this line around in her head, you, the reader, will too.

Just as Omar Tyree exposed the absentee (yet married) father, the golddigging and drug dealing excesses of the 80’s, he has now exposed the confusion about relationships in the X generation going into the new millennium. Tyree challenges the belief that having recreational sex is the same as having a relationship. His books explores monogamy vs. monotomy. He speaks to the dilemma posed by having sex in the 90’s with the spectre of AIDS ever present.

On the one hand, Sweet St. Louis is a modern day love story. On the other, his book is a modern day novel of manners in that it cries out for the need for real relationships. Love between Blacks is no longer defined by economics, Civil Rights, or the struggle, so the quest for fulfilment in love is at an all time high!

But most of all, Sweet St. Louis does not just deal with our smug assumptions about life; it challenges our very belief systems. It takes a peek inside the little dark rooms of our souls. This book doesn’t just look at what’s in the living room of self for all to see. Omar Tyree looks into the dirty laundry. The truth of the matter? In order to have a relationship, one has to deal first with self. For, the irony is, it is only when we go into those little dark rooms of self that we expose our secrets. Once exposed, we find that the truth is not so bad after all. In Sweet St. Louis, the secrets are the fear of commitment and the fear of a relationship. Like Sam Shepard (the scriptwriter of "True West"), Omar Tyree often makes you curl your toes in your shoes. In the words of John Irving’s cleaning lady in his novel, The World According to Garp, Tyree’s Sweet St. Louis hits a nerve and makes you say, "It’s sooo true."