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 […]
I love this book so much.
First, if you haven’t yet read the masterpiece that is Roxane Gay’s recap of Magic Mike XXL, go do that first. Done? Okay, so this book is nothing like that Magic Mike XXL recap, excepting that they are both written by the same very talented writer, who can slip effortlessly from writing obscene yet gut-bustingly hilarious movie recaps with a smidgen of feministic leanings, to writing very deeply personal and intelligent, well-reasoned essays about body image and sexuality and pop culture and rape and race in the […]
Sore Thumb (Part 2)
It’s hard to remember when I first chose to really think about race. Like I said, being a Montanan, and an extremely white Montanan at that, I didn’t know many people of color. My mother claims that I used to cheer for minority characters, even when they were the bad guys, but my clearest memory is being in 5th Grade and taking on a challenging assignment from my teacher Mr. Davey. Read an historical work from an upper reading level. I don’t know what prompted […]
A Different Perspective
“But it’s a lie. I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America.” [359] The summer before beginning college, I received a package from my new school. It was a paperback copy of The English Patient (1992) by Michael Ondaatje. This was the summer reading for all incoming first year students, and the enclosed letter explained that we would have a book discussion during orientation. […]