I read this book in the space of a few hours and as soon as I finished I turned back to the first page again. I didn’t read it all again - just that first page and it worked. It’s a cyclical book. It doesn’t need to be read in any particular order. Memories manifest in any way they want to.
This book is a series of memories told from the point of view of August; a teenager growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s. She states early on in the book that life would have been different if she’d known about jazz, but all she knew of was the top 40 (white artists mostly). And “it never quite figured us out.” I found that one statement to be huge! It’s a 170 page novel, but that statement to me felt bigger than the messages I’ve taken from 1000 page novels. If we can’t see ourselves represented, how can we see ourselves at all? My own white privilege means that this is something I rarely have to think about, but this book helped me to understand how that might feel and it is a scary feeling.
Among issues such as institutionalised racism and that difficult period between childhood and teenagehood, this book also deals with loss of a parent. The first line of the novel completely floored me: “For a long time, my mother wasn’t dead yet.” Tell me you aren’t desperate to read this book based on that line alone!?
This book is lyrical and far-reaching in exactly the same way as Red at the Bone is, so if you liked that one then you really must read this one.
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