4.5 stars. I just can’t keep myself away from mystery books this year. And why would I even want to with fare as good as this? Attica Locke’s The Cutting Season was a really good book and I’m super excited to read her first book because I’ve heard it’s even better. Caren is a middle-aged black woman raising a young daughter on what used to be a Louisiana sugar plantation called Belle Vie. Her family worked the land for decades and Belle Vie is in […]
An Embarrassment of Riches in a Debut Novel
I’m not sure there could be a better time than now for this impressive debut novel from Kaitlyn Greenidge. She addresses racism, white privilege, female relationships, family strife, and loneliness in a novel that centers around a scientific experiment spanning some 60 years. Greenidge’s narrators are four African American girls and women who are intelligent but alone and lonely. Each is searching for a missing connection, for a love that has been missing and might even be considered forbidden or unnatural; each has felt alienation […]
An epic story told well
Yet another book filling in the gaps of my education. I could make this whole review a rant of how most American history tends to skip over everyone who isn’t white and male, but I’ll resist. The Warmth of Other Suns tells the history of The Great Migration, the period in history when 6 million black people fled the South and its Jim Crow laws to make a better life for themselves in the North and West. This migration was a big fucking deal that […]
A well-intentioned mess
(2.5 stars) This was a tough book to read and will be a tough review to write. Love is the Drug is a very ambitious book that plots contemporary social issues and a story of developing one’s identity and independence against the background of a bioterrorist pandemic. Ultimately, I think Johnson just had too many ideas here and as a result several threads were underdeveloped and/or incoherent. Emily Bird, who goes by Bird, is from an affluent black family in Washington DC. Her parents are […]