50books_poc

I just finished reading the novel Push by Sapphire. I have also seen the film. I enjoyed the movie, but I think the book is better; it goes into greater depth about the abuse the protagonist, Precious, suffers at the hands of her mother and father, and you get a better sense of who Precious is and where she is coming from. Don't get me wrong, the movie is wonderful too, and I highly recommend everyone go out and see it, but the book is very powerful and different characters are revealed in different lights. For instance, Sapphire's teacher Ms. Blue Rain isn't as white-washed as in the movie, and her original math teacher is revealed to be more of a coward than he is in the film. It also deals with the politics of Louis Farrakhan and addresses the inequity in the system more than the movie does. I wish I had read the book before seeing the film, but I am glad that the movie inspired me to read the book!

in short: Rotten English: A Literary Anthology edited by Dohra Ahmad (white? editor) is an anthology of poetry, short fiction, novel excerpts, and essays that use, discuss or otherwise engage with vernacular/non-standard/dialectical/world English(es), has a 5:2 ratio of PoC writers to white writers, and has writers from and stories set on every continent other than Antarctica. (I had to double check South America, but Trinidad and Tobago are on the the South American continental shelf, so it totes counts.) The books title is a reference to Ken Saro-Wiwa's novel, Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English.

in which it is all about me: So I haven't posted in a second? w/e, w/e, I'm posting now.

I'm writing this up in particular, because anytime someone says something stupid about how other people talk and how it's "bad", "wrong", "uneducated", "ghetto", etc. I want to throw this book at their head, except for how it would hurt the book. Because I never run out of those moments (irl on the big wide internets) and neither does anyone else and because this anthology is one-stop-shopping for cluebats, I thought others might be interested. If you want to know what prompted me to reread this book now, start here (link) and here (link).

( actual analysis )

28. K. Tempest Bradford, Until Forgiveness Comes

"I used to feel sort of bitter about the people who didn't stop to help the injured and, basically, stepped on them to get out. After that ritual I understood. It was hard not to bolt myself."

Disclosure: Tempest and I are co-bloggers at Geek Feminism, but we haven't met (alas! I am condemned to admire from afar.) "Forgiveness" is a ceremony and a wish-fulfillment fantasy and a serious argument about grief and morality. Above all, it is an effort to placate the angry ghosts in the wake of a terror attack, and to help the living and the dead grope their way towards, if not acceptance, peace. It's an admirably efficient and dense piece of world-building that uses the conventional shorthand of science fiction to shattering political effect. It reminds me a little of the good bits of Frank Herbert's Dune, but it's much better than that.

Now I have to go and read everything else of hers, and she, like all my other favourite short-story writers (Ted Chiang, Leonard Richardson, I'm looking at you) needs to go out and write me a space opera :)

29-30. Octavia Butler, Seed to Harvest and Lilith's Brood

Not that I have time in my life for any other space-operas of genius, not with all the Octavia Butler I have yet to read. I am proud to say I have gotten two middle-aged white men addicted to her works. She's now in my all-time top ten.

If "Fledgling" is about venture capital and "Seed to Harvest" about corporate personhood, limited liability, capitalism and the patriarchy, "Lilith's Brood" - also called the Xenogenesis series - is about rape. Butler tackles the matter from every angle: colonialism, slavery, domestic violence, learned helplessness, genetic engineering, resource exploitation and environmental collapse. Her alien invaders see themselves as benevolent; as behaving as compassionately as they can while obeying the dictates of their genetically-programmed manifest destiny. Her human characters see them as monsters, lovers, saviours and worms.

Her tales are told in her trademark cool, clear, judicious sentences. She gives all her characters agency and integrity. Her jeopardy is not contrived or exaggerated for effect. Instead it stems organically from the facts of the situation. It leaves you with a lump in your throat not unlike the one you may feel when contemplating the death of beloved elders, or studying critical history. She is a bleak writer but she never gives into despair, and the effect of her books, at least for me, is anything but dispiriting. Her clarity of vision gives me courage and stiffens my resolve.

31. Guillermo Rosales, The Halfway House

"I taught five peasants how to read," she confesses.

"Oh yeah? Where?"

"In the Sierra Maestra," she says. "In a place called El Roble."

"I was around there," I say. "I was teaching some of the peasants in La Plata. Three mountains from there."

"How long ago was that, my angel?"

I close my eyes.

"Twenty-two... twenty-three years ago," I say.

"Nobody understands that," she says. "I tell my psychiatrist and he just gives me strong Etafron pills. Twenty-three years, my angel?"

She looks at me with tired eyes.

"I think I'm dead inside," she says.

"Me too."

Now this was a devastating book. William Figueras, a thinly-veiled author avatar, stumbles into a filthy and corrupt community care facility in Miami, where he meets Frances. Both have been betrayed by Cuba, and both still yearn for connection and hope. Simply and vividly written, "Halfway House" evokes the streetscape of Miami, the anxiety of poverty and mental illness and the horror of institutional neglect. If you want your day just freakin' well made, know that this brilliant, unforgettable work was not published until after its author killed himself.

32. Chol Hwan Kang, The Aquariums of Pyongyang

North Korea is pretty much the worst place on earth's government is right down there with the worst in the world. It's the last real Stalinist dictatorship. There is no freedom; of assembly, of religion, of the press, nothing. Kang's book is one of only a handful of pieces of survivor testimony out of the massive concentration camp complex. It's an essential read.

Kang's grandparents were economic migrants from South Korea to Japan, where his grandfather became a successful capitalist while his grandmother became more and more involved in supporting the Communist regime in the North. Eventually she persuaded them to move to Pyongyang. Once there, of course, they could not leave, and predictably enough the capitalist grandfather eventually fell out of favour with the regime.

Among the many diabolical aspects of North Korea is its three-generation punishment policy. Because Kang's grandfather went to the camps, his grandmother, father and all his siblings were sentenced as well. His stories of life in the prison camps are all the more excruciating for their juxtaposition with his normal Westernized childhood in Japan and even his former privileged status in Pyongyang; hence the aquariums of the title. Totalitarian North Korea is not an exotic theme park. It is happening to people like you and me, right now. Go ahead and try not to be haunted by this book.

33. Ying Chang Compestine, The Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party

Repression doesn't have to be total to be horrible. This memoir of growing up in Mao's Cultural Revolution is packaged as a young adult read. It's pretty intense, and the thought of giving it to my daughter depresses me, but hey, it's a dark world out there. The writing is simple and lovely and one narrative twist in particular blindsided me like a whiplash.

(I didn't mean to have three fierce anti-communist screeds in one set of reviews, honest! I'm a very progressive European-style democratic socialist (forget the public option, go single-payer, America!) but I am for, you know, freedom and stuff. To be honest I suspect it's easier for writers of colour to get published if they're writing against nominally leftist regimes and can thus be positioned as poster-children for unregulated industrial capitalism. Saint Octavia, of course, transcends categorization of any kind :))

40. Reza Aslan, How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror

A non-fiction pop book dealing with a wide range of subjects, from the history of the state of Israel, to the difference between Islamist groups like Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Jihadist groups like al-Qa'ida (as well as the inaccuracy of referring to al-Qa'ida as any kind of unified group), to historical examples of other 'cosmic wars' such as the Crusades or the Zealot rebellions of the Roman Empire, to the history of Fundamentalist Christianity in the United States, to others. He doesn't always tie these many, many topics together as tightly as one might wish, but if you look at the book as a smorgasbord of various information about the "war on terror", it's a pretty awesome book.

One of my favorite things about Aslan is that he's a much more lyrical, thoughtful writer than I tend to expect from pop non-fiction. Let me quote a paragraph at you: "When I close my eyes, I see white. Strange how synesthetic memory can be. I am certain the insular town of Enid, Oklahoma, where my family alighted three decades ago, was chockablock with buildings, homes, churches, parks. And surely other seasons came and went in the stretch of time we lived there, months when the city's empty streets were not blanketed in snow and the sky did not rumble with dark and silvery clouds. But I remember none of that. Only the clean, all-encompassing whiteness of Enid, Oklahoma, snow as it heaped on the sidewalks, perched on the trees, and settled evenly over the glassy lake." See? How can you not be willing to spend a couple of hundred pages with the man, even if he wasn't telling you fascinating, important things.

Overall, I think I prefer Aslan's other book, No God But God, to this one, but for a broad summary of many things relating to modern Middle Eastern politics and the American response, this book is great.

( Leslie T. Chang, Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China )

( Lisa See, Peony in Love )

( Varian Johnson, My Life as a Rhombus )

( Sherri L. Smith, Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet )

( Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles )

20: Talking to Strangers, written by Fehed Said, art by various artists

God, I love Fehed Said. I first noticed his name when I read The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga, which included "The Healing", a gorgeous short story written by him with art by Shari Chankhamma. He and Chankhamma also collaborated on "The Forgotten Incident at San Sabian", which appeared in the second Mammoth Best New Manga, and on the graphic novel The Clarence Principle, which I mentioned briefly here (while I was reassembling my thoroughly blown-apart mind), and more fully and coherently at the Forbidden Planet blog.

The keynote of all of those works was surrealism; not flashy, weirdness-for-the-sake-of-weirdness surrealism but true surrealism, with every story being driven by the illogical logic of dreams. The same is true of Talking to Strangers, which features six amazing stories with gorgeous art by five different artists, spanning a wide range of genres from allegory to science fiction to real-world drama. Even the stories with no overtly fantastical elements have a dream-like feel, a sense of significance clinging to every word and every line, a sense that at any moment a leaf could turn into a butterfly that recites poetry, and that would not seem strange at all, only fitting and right.

( Slightly spoilery comments on the individual stories follow. )

These stories are gobsmacking in a few ways: they're consistently good, which is very rare in anthologies, especially comics anthologies for some reason; they span a wide range of tones, styles, genres and themes; and they are, for want of a better word, chewy. They give me things to think about, ideas and images and metaphors that stick in my mind. They have substance, and that substance isn't where I'm used to finding it, or the kind of substance I'm used to finding. What I'm getting at here -- and I've been aware of this since I read The Clarence Principle -- is that Fehed Said's stories come at life from such a fresh and unexpected angle that they leave me blinking and slightly stunned. I love it when a writer can take me by surprise like this.

Title: The House on Mango Street
Author: Sandra Cisneros
Number of Pages: 110 pages
My Rating: 4.5/5

This is a series of vignettes about Esperanza, a pre-teen girl growing up in a latino neighborhood in Chicago. It's very, very short, even shorter than the 110 pages it appears to be, because each story starts halfway down on the page, and often end with just one paragraph or a few lines on the next page, so there's a ton of empty space. The stories are all just little ordinary things, like reading somebody's memories rather than A Novel. I enjoyed it a lot.



Mooch from BookMooch.

'Jupiter Amidships' is a sequal to 'Jupiter Williams', which I reviewed here. This time, the arrogant young hero of Jupiter Williams finds himself press ganged into naval service, and serves on board a British naval ship around the turn of the 18th/19th century.

First of all, this is a really really good book. The characters are well drawn, Jupiter is wonderfully flawed, as ever, and the depiction of the 18th century British navy is unflinching in its accuracy. There's not a lot of romanticisation here - you see it in all its bloody brutality.

Having said that, I struggled with this book a little at times. The first book was very 'boys own' adventure, and this one even more so. In fact, as far as I'm aware, there wasn't a single female character in the book. Of course, this makes sense for a book set entirely on board a ship, but it was something that I vaguely felt the lack of. It was also a very tough book - it kept pressing on, with more and more awful things happening to the heroes and it doesn't let up very much. This isn't unreasonable, considering the context of the story, but at times I did feel a bit like I just desperately wanted to give the poor kid a break! And yet, at the end ( click for spoilers )

As in the case of the last book, I really hope there's a sequel. I think there might be. The story does definitely seem wide open for one.

Hana Maruyama is 38, but has the body of an 80-year-old thanks to Werner’s Syndrome, a genetic defect that causes rapid aging. Hana is almost entirely dependent on her mother, Cate, and the two live a very quiet, orderly life. Hana’s best friend, Laura, has not seen Hana in over ten years, despite repeated offers to visit with her two daughters, who are Hana’s goddaughters. On the verge of divorce, Laura decides to take matters into her own hands, determined to see Hana at least once more before Hana is robbed of her awareness.

The book is split between the present and Cate and Hana’s pasts, not only with their living with Werners, but also the experiences of Cate and her husband, Max, as a biracial couple in the 50s and 60s, and Hana and Laura’s youthful friendship. Tsukiyama’s writing, I think, is better suited for whimsical, if sad, takes on history, and so ends up somewhat stilted when dealing with the present. Very good, but I’m starting to wonder if I’ll like any other book of Tsukiyama’s as much as The Samurai’s Garden.

Digger J Jones by Richard J Frankland (Scholastic, 2007)

Richard Frankland is a well known and highly regarded playwright. This is his first novel: the diary of a Koori boy in 1967, with links to the community at Lake Condah, to the indigenous political organisations centred in Northcote (Melbourne) leading up to the May 27th referendum.

This book does - from my clueless white girl viewpoint - a marvelous job of explaining what was going on in 1967. Vietnam. The referendum. The sheer stupidity of the mere need for the referendum.

The emnity-into-friendship of Digger and Darcy is a highlight of the book: the way that they are forced, again and again, into each other's orbit. I love the involvement of the churches (historically accurate, thank you) in the whole thing: the Catholic church through Sister Ally, and the Aboriginal Evangelical Fellowship (I have to assume) through Digger's family. (I do wish I wasn't constantly wanting to call him "Dumby", though. It's the effect of having every Year Nine in my school studying Deadly, Unna? this year.)

It's at least as good as as Anita Heiss' Who Am I? The Diary of Mary Talance, and it's great to see Frankland writing YA books. While I'm sure this has used a lot of Frankland's own life experience (like Digger, Frankland is a Gunditjmara man with links to Condah), I hope he goes on to write more.

(New tags: a: frankland richard)

Title: Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers
Author: Lois Ann Yamanaka
Genre: Coming-of-age, Hawaiiana
My Rating: 10 out of 10 stars

Summary (from Good Reads): In her exuberant first novel, Lois-Ann Yamanaka tells the story of young Lovey Nariyoshi, who lives in bleak, impoverished Hilo, Hawaii, a place where Japanese- Americans like Lovey find no facsimile of themselves in pop culture, and no trace of their lives reflected in the media. Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers crackles with the language of pidginHawaiian Creoledistinguishing for a new generation of readers one of the most vibrant voices in contemporary culture.

My Review: Anyone who knows me knows that I have a strong connection to the Hawaiian Islands and a strong curiosity to read the stories by Hawaiian authors. I'm not so much interested in the exoticism of the islands as I am the real, true life stories. So when author Lavina Ludlow (novel forthcoming from Casperian Books) suggested the work of Lois-Ann Yamanaka, I was more than willing to dive in.
( Read more... )

# 47 Sylvia Emmerton, My Mob Going to the Beach (Black Ink Press, 2004)

This book was recommended on the list of *30 Books to Read Before You are Three* provided by my local library. I could tell before I saw it that it would be written by an Aboriginal author, as almost every time I see the word 'mob' it is being used by an Aboriginal Australian.

The book has simple, clear pictures by Jaquanna Elliott (who is descended from the Dunghutti people and lives in Townsville) and a nice, repetitive story about going to the beach by Sylvia Emmerton (who is a woman of Kalkadoon descent who was raised in Townsville).

Two thumbs up as a kiddies' book.

This quasi-autobiographical book is about Young Ju Park, a Korean girl who immigrates to the U.S. when she’s 4. Thinking that “Mi Gook,” the Korean term for America, means that America is Heaven, she’s not prepared for the confusion, strangeness, and near-poverty that await her. The book focuses on the difficulties of being an immigrant being raised in two cultures at once, and faced with a parent who cannot adjust to the second culture.

Told in a series of first person, stream of consciousness vignettes, it’s very similar in theme and feel to Sandra Cisneros’s The House of Mango Street, which An Na confirms as an influence, and is the rare (for me) effective use of first person, present tense narration.

I warn, though, for domestic abuse, which is initially vague when Young Ju is too young to understand it, but becomes increasingly clear and explicit as the book continues, coming to a head when she’s in high school. Thankfully, this aspect doesn’t seem to be autobiographical, judging from An Na’s comments. Domestic abuse-both real and fictional-is always horrible, but becomes a little worse when you realize you’re reading someone’s memories.

Title: Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet
Author: Sherri L. Smith
Number of Pages: 167 pages
My Rating: 3/5

When a pipe bursts during Ana Shen's middle school graduation, flooding the field and cutting the ceremony short, it doesn't seem like things could get any worse. Then comes the announcement that the gym is flooded, too, and the graduation dance is cancelled. The dance was going to be Ana's big chance to tell Jamie Tabata she likes him before they go their separate ways for high school, but when her best friend Chelsea ends up inviting Jamie and his family over to Ana's for a graduation dinner, it looks like there might be hope after all. Assuming Ana can keep her grandmothers' rivalry from ruining everything.

I'd seen several reviews for this on and wasn't really that interested, but after reading and loving Flygirl, I decided to give some of Smith's other books a try. This...is definitely no Flygirl. It's cute enough, and it's nice to see a biracial main character (or any character!) who isn't half white, but I wasn't wowed or anything.

I really think the book could have used a lot more editing. Most of it is fine, but it starts to fall apart at the ending, which seems really rushed, plus has a couple of chapters that don't really fit. At one point her grandfather starts telling a story and instead of just making it quick or summarising, we actually get a random flashback chapter in his POV about the event he's relating. We also get a few paragraphs in one of the grandmothers' POV towards the end, in a story that has otherwise been very tight third person with only one POV. It just seemed sloppy.

Also I was really excited about the story being set in LA at first, but it ended up being more frustrating than anything because the author gave all sorts of conflicting details. The kids have gone to school together since kindergarten, yet for some reason they all go to an elementary school in a totally different zone than where they live. (One person going to a far away public school might have some excuse, but not a whole class.) Then the high school mentioned is not the high school that middle school feeds into. Neither is it the high school she would actually be going to for where she's supposed to live. Which being less than a mile from the beach would be Santa Monica and she'd go to SaMoHi, not Uni (also everyone keeps saying University High and I'm sorry but I have never heard anyone call it that; it's Uni). Plus the author gives a freeway exit that they're supposed to live near, which is not less than a mile from the beach, either.

I really don't know what she was thinking. The jacket flap says she lives in LA, so it's not just that she didn't know what she was talking about. It's like she wanted to use real names of stuff, but didn't want to be specific, so she ended up taking bits from all over. If you don't want to be specific, then either be vague or make up names of school and stuff. But if you're going to be specific then you have to get your facts right!

Of course most of the people reading aren't going to know or care, but it really took a lot of fun out of it for me.

Tags: a: smith sherri, african-american, biracial, chinese-american, young adult

Title: Push
Author: Sapphire
Number of Pages: 192 pages
My Rating: 4.5/5

Precious is sixteen, illiterate, and pregnant with her second child by her own father. But when she gets kicked out of junior high and starts attending an alternative school, her life finally starts to turn around.

This is written in an experimental style, very stream-of-consciousness, with lots of dialect to mimic the way precious talks. Some parts are even written as if Precious had written them herself, complete with spelling errors, which gradually improve over the course of the book. I didn't find that a barrier at all, though. It was really easy to read (I zipped through it in two sittings). The last fifty pages or so of the book are essays and poems written by Precious and the other girls in her class.

Pretty much everything bad you could imagine happening has happened to Precious and it sometimes seems like overkill, but overall I really enjoyed the book. And I'm glad the ending was optimistic but realistic and not all magically wonderful.

I'm definitely interested in seeing the movie, though probably not til it's out on DVD. I was looking at the cast, though, and um...wtf? The teacher is described as dark with dreads, yet somehow in the movie she is really lightskinned and has wavy hair. It's like they made her as close to a Nice White Lady as possible without actually casting a white actress. D:

Set in 19th century China, this is the story of Lily, a girl of low birth who becomes a laotong, or “old same” with Snow Flower, a girl of higher birth. A laotong is a lifelong friend who is closer to you than anyone else, and two laotong seem to be essentially regarded as two parts of one person.

The book chronicles their love story (I find it difficult to call it anything else, as their love, rather viewed as platonic or romantic, is the strongest emotion and guiding force in either’s life) from when they meet at age seven, undergoing the footbinding process on the same day, and covers all the highs and lows of love. In addition to the laotong relationship, See also focuses on the intricacies of nu shu, a secret language that Chinese women used to communicate with for centuries. The nu shu is fascinating, especially in its ability to have multiple meanings.

Like Peony in Love, this felt like “the average American’s guide to Chinese history and culture,” and I found it difficult to like any of the characters, but found See to be a good enough writer, and her stories interesting enough, to compensate for that. I don’t think, though, that See does quite as good a job of differentiating her views from those of the characters as she does in Peony in Love, and I should warn that there’s a fair bit of detail given to the footbinding ceremony and its consequences, though it’s not nearly as graphic as it could be.

Title: Rabbit-Proof Fence
Author: Doris Pilkington
Number of Pages: 137 pages
My Rating: 4/5

This is the true story of how three girls, Molly, Daisy, and Gracie, escaped from a residential school designed to turn half-white Aboriginal children into servants for white families and walked 1600 km back to their home.

It's a good story and I enjoyed learning more about Australian history, but I found the writing style sort of hard to get into. It's neither a novel nor a straight historical account, but a mix of both, and that didn't really work for me. There would be bits written in a very fictional tone, including thoughts from characters the author couldn't have known the thoughts of, and then you'd hit a big section with excerpts of historical documents, complete with citations.

Still, I enjoyed it (and it helped that it was quite short) and would definitely recommend it.

I'm curious to see the movie and see how it compares with the book.

39. Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, Black London: Life Before Emancipation

This was a great book, but not quite as great as I wanted it to be. An academic work as readable as any pop non-fiction book, Black London deals with the historical presence of black people in London throughout history, although the focus is on the 1700s. The author says that she decided to write this book when, while doing research, a bookseller told her, "Madam, there were no black people in England before 1945".

I loved how this book didn't just give generalities about black life in the 1700s, but used the historical record to find real individuals and tell their stories: slaves, escaped slaves, servants, husbands and wives (it appears to have been quite common for black men to marry white women during this time), shop-owners, writers, the children of African elites come to Europe to study, the mixed-race children of Caribbean planters, actors, beggars, and on and on. I found it really fascinating and wished the whole book had been about these stories of people. Alas, about half the book is actually taken up with recounting the stories of two legal changes (and the mostly white lawyers, judges, plaintiffs, defendants, reporters, etc, etc, involved): the James Somersett lawsuit of 1771, which outlawed slavery in England itself, and the Slave Trade Act of 1807, which abolished the slave trade. While these parts of the book were interesting, they weren't as incredibly awesome as the first part. Still, I enjoyed this book, and am excited to see she has another about black people during the Victorian period.

(I'm so far behind in reviewing that I've skipped forward a little; I will go back and do the books I read in October, though, and hopefully catch up by the end of this month.)

#39: Jenny Han, Shug

Annemarie Wilcox, nicknamed "Shug" by her family, is just starting junior high, and a lot of things are changing. Her family is showing the strain of the constant fights between her parents, her friends are more interested in boyfriends than in girlfriends, and Shug herself suddenly has a crush on Mark, the boy she's been best friends with forever. But everything is changing too fast for Shug, and she wonders why she can't just stay a kid.

This is slightly lower in age range than the YA I normally read, but it's rewardingly rich, more complex than it seems at first glance. Shug's family in particular is beautifully observed: her beautiful, alcoholic mother; her often absent father; her pretty sister Celia, nearly ready to leave the nest; and Shug herself, whose voice is pitch-perfect, poised on the verge of young adulthood but uncertain of how to get there. As she also does in _The Summer I Turned Pretty_ (which I read in July and really liked), Han does an excellent job of capturing that uncertain time when a girl starts to turn from a child into a young woman.

#40: Zetta Elliott, A Wish After Midnight

Fifteen-year-old Genna lives in Brooklyn in a cramped apartment in a crime-filled neighborhood and dreams of a better future and a career as a psychiatrist. Her only consolations are her boyfriend Judah, who's from Jamaica and wants to go back to Africa, and her nearly daily visits to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where she tosses a few coins into the fountain and makes a wish. One night, when she flees into the garden after a fight with her mother, she is transported back in time to Civil-War-era Brooklyn, into a time of racial tension and outright rioting.

Genna is a wonderful character -- tough, smart, resourceful, and thoughtful -- and the rest of the characters, while we don't get to know them as thoroughly as Genna, are vivid as well. Also vivid are the settings: present-day and past Brooklyn, which are both beautifully evoked in their differences and in their similarities. The historical details are telling, but never bog down the narrative. Elliott's presentation of racial issues is complex, both in present and past: Judah feels solely African and wants to go back to Africa, while Genna feels that she is also American and wants to reconcile the different parts of her heritage.

Clearly there are comparisons to be made here with Octavia Butler's excellent Kindred, and Elliott's book stands up very well to the comparison. It made me think of Kindred (and think that they would be very good back-to-back reads) while never making me feel that it was at all imitating it.

I should also note that there is at least one major plot thread left unresolved, and that Elliott is apparently working on a sequel, Judah's Tale, which I eagerly anticipate.