A book club book! I knew nothing about this, other than the title, and it really knocked me back on my heels. It's a story about Ella, a young Black girl, whose brother Kev is born during the Rodney King riots. It follows them and their mother as they leave South Central for Harlem, and then Kev's incarceration in Rikers, and his release to a place called Watts. Ella has a Thing, where she can feel and sense the violence that's coming for people, and the story is somewhere between magical realism and sci-fi and dystopia, but really it's just classic speculative fiction.
It made me think for obvious reasons of The Deep, and how narratives can pull apart trauma, and create a new narrative, and what that requires. It was also deeply affecting to read this book that was written in 2019 now, in a post-George Floyd world, because it was a pre- and current and post-Rodney King world before it was that, and it was an Emmet Till world before that one, and so on. But I wonder how ready I would have been to have read this book even a year ago, to say nothing of ten years ago, given where the narrative lands. This book will stay with me.
Grade: A
No comments:
Post a Comment