There are so many different moments of racial tension touched on in Last Call on Decatur Street that sung beautifully. Rosemary and Gabrielle have a lThere are so many different moments of racial tension touched on in Last Call on Decatur Street that sung beautifully. Rosemary and Gabrielle have a longstanding relationship that takes a pivotal turn one fateful night and perhaps may never recover. Rosemary’s feelings of being left out at times (when around Gabby and her family) and of not necessarily understanding where she went wrong in the relationship come off as a genuine and authentic look at community, "othering" and white privilege. Case in point:
Her tolerance made me feel special, a quick affirmation of intimacy. She was doing it now.
Here, Rosemary refers to Gabby’s tolerance for racial microaggressions—despite the numerous times she says something that could be offensive to Gabby throughout this book, she’s gotten used to Gabby waving or “patting” it off, but, because she doesn’t know any better, it’s never really addressed as a microaggression. Yet, Cohen did a good job of writing these scenes so that it’s obvious that she understands the nuances of these racially charged moments even if Rosemary does not.
Last Call on Decatur Street was a phenomenal novel full of beautiful cultural nuances and delicate cultural motivations, situations and references that rang absolutely true. This passage seemed to sum up Rosemary’s outlook on the racial tensions in New Orleans, and I found it to be completely true to her personality and understandable from a racial standpoint:
Or the Mardi Gras Indians, I was scared of them, preening and strutting, owning their streets with an aggressive beauty. I couldn’t explain that my fear was a sign of respect, my deference felt like the only gift I could offer them in the face of our brutal, messed up racial history. That was also my New Orleans, and we didn’t talk about it. Everything was unsaid but intuited, our way of doing things, a silence heavy as iron…Gaby knew my New Orleans, the million little rules we all implicitly followed. That first question we all asked each other: where’d you go to high school? That quick recognition of how everyone fit into the fabric of this dumb city, held by a million tiny knots of habit and expectation.
It was very interesting to see the cultural phenomenon of double consciousness viewed from the other side of the table (from the Caucasian POV) via this relationship between these two women. Iris Martin Cohen seems to accurately portray what it must be like to not understand the unspoken nuances of being black that other blacks do understand among themselves. In that way, this book seems very accurate.
You guys may know that I'm not the biggest fan of YA literature - more accurately, it's just not a go-to genre of mine. But, I was really intrigued byYou guys may know that I'm not the biggest fan of YA literature - more accurately, it's just not a go-to genre of mine. But, I was really intrigued by this one when HarperCollins asked me to read it. I have to say, this is a phenomenal, roller coaster of a ride! The twists and turns are endless and you WANT to root for these kids - well, teens. :-) It goes for a dystopian-esque sort of feel, while still being very contemporary and modern-day. In fact, the political infrastructure of this novel is very sophisticated for YA, and this book has some good moments of social commentary.
I've never read Kelly deVos' work before, but I was thrilled to be a small part of the process for Day Zero, and I HIGHLY recommend it to lovers of YA. ****
Steven Rowley’s The Editor is a jaunty, light read that attempts humor on every page. The opening of the novel, in many ways, reminded me of a duller,Steven Rowley’s The Editor is a jaunty, light read that attempts humor on every page. The opening of the novel, in many ways, reminded me of a duller, less funny version the wide-eyed Andrea Sachs of The Devil Wears Prada but from a male perspective. However, Rowley’s version read more in the vein of puerile than comical, and the jokes and moments of humor never really hit the mark for me. As I read this novel, the attempts at comedy only distracted from the reading experience, because they managed to take away from the book’s atmosphere rather than add to it. They fell flat and just came off as borderline YA, misplaced in The Editor’s setting. It’s possible that it was my own misunderstanding, but I was hoping for a more substantive read – something with a little more meat on the bones that I could really fall into. It’s possible that I would have responded better to this book if I’d known the type of humor that it was going for – borderline slapstick as the James Smale regales us with stumbling all over himself – and the fluffy way in which the story would be told.
Let’s start from the beginning: In 1992, James Smale is a writer living in New York City who hasn’t been published in years. What he has accomplished is a slew of soul-crushing temp assignments involving hours sitting in cubicle after cubicle; he’s witnessed the demise of his family unit on the subject of his homosexuality and he’s written a book about his mother. A cold woman he never really felt he knew, she is an accidental topic that spills out of James as a form of therapy while he tries to grapple with who she is and how they feel about each other. It is this book that lands him in the orbit of Jackie Kennedy Onassis. When James arrives at the publishing house to meet the editor who wants to buy his book, never in his wildest dreams did he imagine that it would be the Mrs. Onassis. He is dumbstruck and dumbfounded and worried how his mother, a devout Catholic and avid admirer of the Kennedy family, will feel about having her life read and edited by one of her idols. James and Jackie develop a friendship he never expected, and as they work together on his manuscript, she encourages him to go back home to confront his demons of the past so that he can write the perfect, authentic ending for the book. But when a long-held family secret is revealed, he realized his editor may have had a larger plan that goes beyond the page…
The Editor is a cozy read that pairs well with a mug of Earl Grey tea and warm footie socks. It leans into the territory of heartfelt, going for the heartstrings that for most of us are triggered by matters such as family, ailing elderly parents, apartheid within the ranks of a nuclear unit and the realization of finally meeting one’s goals. You’ll find all of that here, wrapped around a sincere writer still grappling with his past writer, his ice-cold mother, his now-estranged father and the Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in all her prim fineness and glamour. Jackie Kennedy Onassis, here, is painted as a real person – someone who waits in line at the copy machine and likes the occasional drink after work – and that portrayal of her I really appreciated. It was approachable and dynamic, as I’m sure Rowley intended for her to be. She quietly and demurely stole the show both as and in The Editor. However, the rest of the cast of characters would have interested me more if they’d been explored through a more profound lens, if the interactions between them had been conceived with more depth and less failed attempts at awkward humor. After a while, those attempts just make the read itself awkward for the reader, and that’s not the relationship I’d hoped for with this book. But alas, I don’t doubt that many readers will enjoy this novel. Just be prepared for what you’re in for – at times inane humor, a writer’s journey both personally and professionally and the effortlessly exotic bird that is the Jackie Kennedy we think of at its center. ***
*I received a physical copy of this novel from the publisher, G.P. Putnam's Sons in exchange for an honest review. Thanks so much to the publisher!
The Farm has a phenomenal premise with well-executed imagery. The grounds of the "farm" and described so that you feel you're there yourself and the cThe Farm has a phenomenal premise with well-executed imagery. The grounds of the "farm" and described so that you feel you're there yourself and the characters are all lifelike and realistic. BUT, I didn't like this book as much as I'd hoped I would when I eagerly picked it up. The situations Jane finds herself in the farm lacked the emotion and drama that I'd hoped for. While she was so upset at how confining the farm was, I honestly felt like a lot of the situations weren't that big of a deal and were completely fair under the terms she'd offered to work for the farm. And while I know that Ramos wanted to be true to the soft-spoken, Filipino woman she wanted to portray, I found Jane too meek and boring to really root for her.
The white kids will complain—another bullshit corporate condominium, destroying the neighborhood—but those same white kids will move in. I n4.5 stars!
The white kids will complain—another bullshit corporate condominium, destroying the neighborhood—but those same white kids will move in. I never thought I’d live in a place like this but, ugh, I need a dishwasher. And I hate laundromats. All my friends are here and besides, the design fits the neighborhood, not like those other buildings, plus a doorman. All the cachet of the neighborhood and none of the hassles. The guilty thrill of being surrounded by blackness without having to live like them. Not separate but unequal.
Wil Medearis’s debut novel, Restoration Heights, cleverly weaves together the lives of the wealthy and the destitute, the disenfranchised and the entitled, and the color lines between black and white into a sublimely realistic portrait of the class and race divisions in this country, as seen through the lens of gentrified Bed-Stuy, New York. More than that, though, this novel is a thrilling page-turner with a protagonist you can root for and supporting characters who aren’t often what they seem.
Leaving aside the summary of this novel, as the description blurb is wholly accurate, Restoration Heights was a delightfully surprising find for me. In many ways, it reminded me of Sam Graham-Felsen’s Green, published in 2018, in that it is a novel written by a young white man about the experiences of living in the middle of a mostly minority neighborhood. Medearis’s protagonist, Reddick, not only identifies with the neighborhood and feels wholly at home there, but he embarks on a search to find a missing woman he met only briefly the night before that ultimately forces him to confront his place within that neighborhood—and within society’s stone-set caste system as well. And as he explores economic disparities and racial tensions in the inner-city, Reddick, who constantly mentions his part African-American grandfather in innocent attempts at proving his authenticity, finds himself at the heart of a makeshift investigation of a young woman’s disappearance—a young woman who’s engaged to an old-money Upper East Side scion but is last seen drunk with two black men in Bed-Stuy. This such racial and class tensions in play, the stakes have never been higher.
I’ve got some sorry news. There is no people. That’s the hardest lesson this country taught me. It is the heart of my success. You want this to be a community but it’s only a territory. Individuals stuck in the same place, battered by the same forces.
Medearis shines in this debut as an emerging author who understands both the obvious and unspoken rules of various caste systems that converge in our society. He explores them skillfully through a fluid intermixing of characters who can use “slang so thick it bordered on code” side by side with those who own William Merritt Chase paintings and drink from Wedgwood cups. The way they brush against each other is both believable and simultaneously flushed with the acridity one would expect from such interactions. At the same time, Medearis does manage to bring something new to the table: He manages to both stun and thrill with unexpected plot twists and characters who are life-sized and realistic. While you’ll find a few well-known typecasts within these pages, Medearis manages to give them more dimension, life and bite; they never fall into the category of played-out stereotypes and that I appreciated. Restorations Heights offers addictive and authentic prose that moves in cadence with the realism of our everyday lives and interactions with the world around us, something I look for in contemporary writing. Thus, Wil Medearis won me over, and I give his debut novel 4.5 stars.
*I received a copy of this novel from the publisher, Hanover Square Press, via Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.
The eyelids flutter. The breathing is irregular. The muscle tone is visibly slack. With each new patient…these signs that the sleepers might be dreamiThe eyelids flutter. The breathing is irregular. The muscle tone is visibly slack. With each new patient…these signs that the sleepers might be dreaming.
Karen Thompson Walker’s sophomore novel, The Dreamers, took me by storm. Excuse the cliché, but it swept me up inside of an imaginative world that was close enough to reality as to not be science fiction but close enough to an altered reality as to border dystopia. The sickness sweeping the town took on a life of its own—the true antagonist in this novel. It left behind an eerie quiet upon this Southern California town, which Walker punctuated beautifully— disconcertingly: an explosion here, a dog still on its leash wandering the silent neighborhood there, a man sleepwalking in the middle of the road who may or may not meet his end with a vehicle. I wasn’t sure that I would fall in love with this novel from the start. Yet, Walker’s un-embellished method of storytelling grew on me gradually but commendably in such a way that I hadn’t realized I’d fallen for this book until I was already hopelessly at its mercy, drawn into its altered reality completely.
Mei is a freshman in college when the sleeping sickness chokes the small town she lives in. She’s suffering from typical first-year introvert blues: not fitting in, being generally ignored by the entire student body around her. Until. It starts in her dorm, on her floor, with the pretty, lip gloss smacking girls and popular boys falling prey to sleep one by one. When a panic stirs and the students are quarantined, it’s not long before they find a way to break out of captivity and scatter, running in all directions, back into the world—carrying the sleeping sickness sweeping across the town with them.
I thoroughly enjoyed The Dreamers. It is a thoughtful read featuring a cast of odd-balls. The social outcasts and unconventionalists reign supreme within these pages, offering the reader an inside glimpse into a young couple’s broken marriage, a motherless household of doomsday preppers, and one man’s sorrow at the loss of his partner.
I will say that I wish the book had gone further, pushed the bounds just a tad more. That is both a compliment and a critique simultaneously, the former in that I wanted to read more about these characters, and the latter in that I wish Walker had explored this avenue she started to veer on toward the end: an avenue lined in nightmares and premonitions.
“Like just now,” he says. “When you came into the kitchen, I had the sensation that you were standing beside me, but that was before you walked in.” It’s like everything’s out of order, he says, like there’s something wrong with the sequence, as if the future were coming before the past.
I wonder where this path could have led us, what wondrous views we could have seen from that perch. Alas, Walker took us to the edge of that cliff—far enough so that we could see what could be—but never pushed us into the arms of what was below. Some would praise her for such restraint, while others would yearn to place their feet upon that path less taken. I, myself, am on the fence, one foot hanging midair of what could have been, the other solidly placed in the reality of what the novel offered.
The Dreamers moved me. I thought about this book when I was away from it and turned the pages swiftly, hungrily, when I was in its company. I recommend this novel to lovers of fiction writing, particularly dystopian fiction or narratives featuring altered realities and small towns in a panic. I liked the compactness of the book, the fact that every word, every chapter, had its place in moving the narrative forward. But, I would not have objected to being taken further into this new dimension that was presented but only tepidly explored. All in all, Karen Thompson Walker and The Dreamers earned a solid 4.5 stars rounded up to 5.
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