Recently Reviewed


March 2, 2024


Jason Reynolds is such a great young adult author. In When I Was the Greatest, he explores the power and the limits of friendship. Ali is a kid with a strong connection to his family. His best friends who live next door, Noodles and Needles, are not so lucky. Their dad left and their mom is rarely home. The two boys, who fend for themselves differently, make out all right, especially with the help of Ali’s friendship, Ali’s mom’s wisdom, and Ali’s sister’s cooking. That is, until Ali insists that they go to an off-the-hook party on the other side of town, a party that they’re too young–and too naive–to attend. What happens next rocks the foundation on which their friendship is built, and they may not all come out unscathed.


February 23, 2024


Agatha of Little Neon by Claire Luchette is quiet, profound, and pithy. It is the story of four “women religious” told by one of the sisters, Agatha. The sisters do their holy work at a halfway house where they live alongside recovering addicts and newly-released convicts who are trying to walk the path of righteousness back to the expectations of society. What I particularly love about the book is that there is no loud narrative arc with a BANG! of a climax. The story unfolds like a whisper with a single character’s slight shift in mindset and movement. That’s how real life is, after all—we change very slowly if we change at all.


February 15, 2024


I love Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata! In 163 pages, Murata managed to make me laugh, furrow my brow in anger and consternation, draw me into the sensory world of a Japanese convenience store, and ultimately, think about society’s expectations and how we so easily fall prey to them. I will never walk into a convenience store again without thinking about this book!

January 12, 2024


Hell of a Book by Jason Mott is an incredible weaving of the real and the imaginary, painted with poetic language and including a message that America needs to hear. The story follows a new writer on his first book tour. His book, titled Hell of a Book, has given him instant fame, and audiences are clamoring to hear about the inspiration behind it. There are a few problems with this: first, the inspiration for the book was so traumatic that, after he wrote it, he basically blocked it out, and second, his imagination is untamable. He is unable to distinguish between fiction and real life. Even with a professional Media Trainer and an agent who is determined to sell as many books as possible, the author struggles to determine where reality ends and his imagination begins.

November 5, 2023


If you were a middle- or high-school-aged girl in the 1980s and want a trip down memory lane, We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry is for you! The story follows a high school field hockey team as they try to reinvent themselves after a losing season. In order to achieve this greatness, they make some questionable choices, including listening to the advice of one player’s incredible set of bangs (known as “The Claw”). The story is funny, heartfelt, and imbued with nostalgia that only a woman in her 40s can feel when references are made to Aqua Net, Almond Joy commercials, and “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.” Quan Barry captures the stupidity and strength of being a girl in the 80s, and she does not hesitate to reckon with the way that femaledom has changed (for better and worse) in the ensuing years.

April 23, 2023


The Removed by Brandon Hobson brings to life Cherokee myth and folklore. Told through the viewpoint of different members of the Echota family and the spirit of Tsala, the story follows how each family member has been affected by the loss of Ray-Ray, the middle son of the family. Every year, the Echotas have a bonfire to remember Ray-Ray, a time to grieve his loss and celebrate his life. As the bonfire approaches this year–fifteen years after his death–an amazing event occurs. A teenager named Wyatt is placed in the Echotas’ care, a foster child who carries the spirit of Ray-Ray. Wyatt is amiable, silly, and wise beyond his years. His presence in the family helps them heal, and his presence in the book helps readers understand how the history of the Cherokee people and their spiritual beliefs continue to reverberate in their lives today.

March 30, 2023


The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates is a novel written from the perspective of a slave or a “Tasked” as Coates calls those in bondage. Hiram has an incredible memory, which he uses to wow the Southern Whites or the “Quality,” including his white father. The one memory that he wants to hold but cannot, however, is that of his mother dancing, the last memory that he has of her before she was ripped from his life when he was only five.


Hi uses his impressive memory and his connection to the master of the plantation to rise in rank to the house of his father-master, to come as close as a Tasked can get to the Quality, but he is never free. He is bound to his father, to his brother, to the plantation, and later–when he eventually finds a kind of freedom–he is bound to that in a way as well. 


I read Coates’ memoir The Beautiful Struggle long ago, but I enjoyed this novel much more. He immersed himself in a world of the past and made it tingle with the emotions and magic of a life lived within the body and the shadow of slavery.

February 13, 2023


It was hard to resist the temptation of the unique collective noun in the title An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon. The book itself is unique as well, taking place on an enormous spacecraft where the hierarchy and abuses of Earth continue with the added horror that there is a single sovereign who is supposedly chosen by the Heavens to lead the ship to salvation. Each “sin” committed by the spaceship’s citizens is deemed an impediment to everyone being saved. The cruelty issued by the sovereign, of course, is not considered a sin, since he is the hand of God.


We follow the protagonist Aster as she tries to live her life as a medic in the bowels of the ship. Her story is complex and often hard to follow as she tries to decipher her dead mother’s journals to find a way to escape the spaceship. There is so much scientific language in the book–some made up, I think; some that I just did not know–that I often lost the strand of the story. It is clear that Rivers Solomon has a mind as brilliant as Aster’s, but a plebian like me could only bumble through her brilliance.

November 13, 2022


In Yes, Chef, Marcus Samuelsson details his life from being an orphan in Ethiopia to an adopted son in Sweden to a world-renowned chef in New York City. From when he was a young boy helping his Swedish grandmother in the kitchen to the opening of his own restaurant The Red Rooster in Harlem, Samuelsson was always–as he put it– “chasing flavors.” He mixed and combined spices from his travels to many countries, trying to always find something new and exciting that struck the palate just right.


Coming up in the restaurant industry as a young black man was not easy. Samuelsson faced prejudice and a dearth of black mentors, but he was determined to succeed and wanted to lead the way for other black chefs to follow him. I love the last lines of his memoir, which exist in contrast to Richard Wright’s feeling of being the ever-outsider. Samuelsson writes, “I spent so much of my life on the outside that I began to doubt that I would ever truly be in with any one people, any one place, any one tribe. But Harlem is big enough, diverse enough, scrappy enough, old enough, and new enough to encompass all that I am and all that I hope to be. After all that traveling, I am, at last, home” (315). 


Maybe in 2013 Harlem, Wright would have found his people, too.

September 4, 2022


The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw is a collection of short stories that will shock you, break your heart, and make you sing. The stories portray a theme that is both obvious and cloaked in shadow: People are complex. Women are complex. Church ladies are complex. In the stories, Philyaw embodies young women, old women, celibate women, gay women, lost women, strong women. And each voice is piercing, relatable, and–I have to say it again–complex. People may open their hearts to God and still be cruel; they may close their hearts to God and still be holy. Philyaw reminds us in this collection that there are many ways to live and love, to worship God and to be a woman.

July 25, 2022


In his book Night of the Living Rez, Morgan Talty takes readers onto a Panawahpskek Nation reservation in Maine, but he does not leave us there. He takes us deeper. He carries us into the heart of a mother-son relationship, into a sweat lodge under the earth, into the bodies of grief and love. When we walk with him, we see cruelty and tenderness and suffering and a voice so intimate that we will feel as if it is our own.


This compilation of short stories does what good fiction is supposed to do: it portrays a world that exists but often goes unnoticed, and it uncovers motivations and emotions in characters that exist in us all, ones that make us uncomfortably and beautifully human.


July 12, 2022


In Richard Wright’s autobiography Black Boy, he shows over and over–with details that will make your stomach clench–what it means to be an outsider: as a black boy in the South, as a non-believer in a religious household, as an inquisitive mind in a school that demands obedience above all else, as an employee at a job where dreams of a promotion are unattainable. When Wright finally heads to Chicago–to the North! To freedom!--it seems he will finally be an insider, among intellectuals, among people who believe in his humanity, among those who challenge the racial status quo that he had become used to in the South. 


But this is not what he finds there. In Chicago, too, he feels bound by many of the racial divides that existed for him in Mississippi. He does not, for example, dare to tell his boss in the cafe where he works that the white cook is spitting in the food because he is afraid that HE will be fired. When white people see him reading sophisticated books and magazines, they do not hide their awe. Worst of all, when he thinks he has finally found his people, writers and thinkers who dare to challenge the structure of the American government and its foundational racism, he is ultimately let down when they want only soundbites from him, not deep exploration, not slowly dawning discoveries or revised insights. He writes, “The only truth that prevailed was that which could be shouted and quickly understood” (295). 


Wright finds his place among words. He is an insider there. He sacrifices food and money to write because it is that important to him. And we are the beneficiaries of his sacrifices. “Humbly now, with no vaulting dream of achieving a vast unity, I wanted to try to build a bridge of words between me and that world outside, that world which was so distant and elusive that it seemed unreal” (384). He shares his words with us, and through his story, his life, his legacy, he is an outsider no longer.

March 7, 2022


Nazaré by JJ Amaworo Wilson could not have been released at a more relevant time. It is the story of a scrappy band of laborers triumphing over an organized superpower, or–more specifically–of a boy who defeats a man with the power of nature, the power of knowledge, the art of persuasion, and an understanding of people and the land. 


Kin grew up an orphan, surviving on the streets by scavenging what he needed to get by, avoiding the Tonto Macoute, and controlling his fear. When he is charged with Black Magic for single-handedly pushing a beached whale out to sea, he begins a journey that will end with a face-off with a tyrant whose family has ruled the city of Balaal for centuries. Throughout his journey, he learns from the people and land around him, and they–in turn–protect and support this boy who asks for nothing more than to live.

February 2, 2022


Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue follows a Cameroonian immigrant and his family as they make their way in America. Jende Jonga works for a rich investment banker as his chauffeur, a job he does with pride, efficiency, and pleasure. His hours are long, but the pay is great, and he and his wife Neni are able to save money as they dream of owning their own house and raising their son and newborn with all the opportunities that America provides. 


The story shows an immigrant family that is not running from civil war, from abject poverty, or from gang warfare; the Jongas simply want more opportunities than are available to them in Cameroon. Neni wants to become a pharmacist; Jende wants to make enough money for his children to have the world open to them. Their lives in America, however, are tied to the whims of the rich and powerful, and when the rich and powerful flicker, the Jongas flicker, too.

December 30, 2021


In Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad, he imagines that the underground railroad actually ran under the ground–a feat of abolitionist engineering ingenuity, a subway track with a hand-pumped train car. Just like in The Nickel Boys, you can feel The Underground Railroad in your bones. There is pain and there is beauty. Whitehead develops an array of very-human characters: a determined escaped slave; a stubborn white slave catcher and his dedicated black driver; a nervous but proud white station master. 


As we follow Cora along the railroad, we see what Tim O’Brien coined “Story Truth,” a fictional account that nonetheless pulls in the real emotions that must have accompanied running away from the plantation–fear, hope, joy, blind trust, wonder, surprise, fury. Each time Cora goes aboveground to a new station, we hope for her, just as she has renewed hope. And each time she must descend again–the laws about runaway slaves changed, the station was discovered, the slave catchers are in town–fear settles in our guts, compounding the disappointment in a nation determined to dehumanize.

November 27, 2021


You can feel Colson Whitehead’s novel The Nickel Boys in your bones. It’s a grinding of the teeth, a pop of the knee, a crack of the ankle. It’s painful. And yet, he gives you beauty, too: the love between a grandmother and her grandson, the growth of an unlikely friendship between two lonely young men, and (thanks to otherworldly patience) the realization of a longed-for dream.


The story follows Elwood Curtis, an aspiring undergrad who gets caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. A sentence far more severe than his “crime,” Elwood is sent to The Nickel Academy, where wayward boys go to be reformed. Beneath the glossy surface of the school’s reputation, Elwood discovers the reality of injustice, the cruelty of those in power, and how much easier it is to follow Dr. King’s advice to love your oppressors until freedom is won when you are listening to the speech in a small room in your grandmother’s house rather than in solitary confinement. 


Inspired by a real place, The Dozier School for Boys, The Nickel Boys is a reminder that to find injustice, you only need to stretch your arms out or open your eyes, where you will likely find its remnants scattered all around you.

October 24, 2021


Inside Out & Back Again by Thanhhà Lại is as lovely as the cover would suggest. Written from the perspective of Hà, a Vietnamese girl who flees her beloved country with her mother and three older brothers, this story enchants the reader with its simple beauty. Although it is marketed as a book for 8-12 year olds, I (at 44) could not put it down. Each poem pulls the reader closer into Hà’s world. You will know what fresh papaya, from a tree tended by your own hands, tastes like. You will know what it is like to have a name that American kids scorn. You will know what kindness looks like and how pity feels. Thanhhà Lại puts in your hands an uprooted childhood and shows you how to investigate its every branch. 

September 26, 2021


In Parable of the Talents, Octavia E. Butler takes hold of your gut and twists. The story, told by Lauren Olamina’s daughter Larkin and a continuation of Parable of the Sower, follows the teachings of Olamina and the community of believers that she builds called Acorn. To outsiders, the community is perceived as a cult, but to those who live there, it is a safe haven, a place for their families to grow, learn, and experience the joy of trusting others, something that is nearly impossible to achieve outside of Acorn’s borders.


Just as the reader starts to appreciate Acorn and what it stands for, Butler shoves reality onto the scene, and the horrors of the America beyond Acorn’s borders crushes in on it. The intrusion sickened me, and yet--the idea of “conversion for your own good” does not seem that out of reach for some of America’s fanatics today.


As in Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler shows in Parable of the Talents her prescience about the way America could fall apart, who might claim to be able to “Make America Great Again,” and how that person could manipulate the masses to feel like they have power, control, and something to believe in.

August 31, 2021


The Power by Naomi Alderman takes our stereotypes of gender roles and scrambles them like so many eggs on a chicken farm. In the world she creates, women discover a latent power from which electricity flows, allowing them to electrocute people and objects around them. In a matter of months, men become the weaker sex. Throughout the book, Alderman explores what a world with women in power would look like--not just power through leadership roles, which they do have, but the power to take without resistance, the power to hurt with the flick of a wrist, the power to kill.


I just couldn’t get enough of this book. Its fast-paced action kept me gripping the pages until long past my bedtime, and its character development and intricate relationships kept me surprised at every turn. I’m impressed by the thoroughness of Alderman’s creation. She follows through with the gender role reversal down to the final letters exchange at the end of the book. The power of the women she portrays is both subtle and blatant, and the incontrovertible truth of that power forces the reader to think hard about the allowances that we give to men in our world today.  

August 9, 2021


The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas is a great book, especially for teens--especially especially for white teens. The novel looks at the effects of police brutality and snap judgements on a tight-knit, struggling community. Told through the eyes of Starr, daughter of an ex-gang member and a nurse, the book follows her feelings of heartbreak, fear, and anger as she navigates the loss of her childhood best friend at the hands of a police officer, a murder she witnesses.


The book is easy to compare to Jason Reynolds’ and Brendan Kiely’s book All American Boys, which also addresses an act of police brutality, but there are a few key differences. Angie Thomas, I feel, creates more complex characters than Reynolds and Brendan do. Starr is a black student going to a nearly all-white prep school. She has a white boyfriend whom she adores and he feels the same about her. Her father is an ex-gang member. He and his family live and work in the neighborhood where gang activity still takes place. He owns a grocery store and is well-respected in the community. Starr has a brother whose step-dad is the leader of one of these gangs; her brother, Seven, is trying to stay in school and stay focused, but it’s hard when he sees his step-father abusing his mom and two sisters. 


The community where Starr lives is run-down, what her private school friends would call “the ghetto,” but that’s where her dad’s store is, it’s where she grew up, and it’s where her neighbors help each other out. Gangs perpetrate violence, but they also provide protection for their members, an offer that is enticing to certain kids who want a way to make money and to protect their families. It’s a difficult cycle to break, but Starr’s dad did, and he works to pull other kids out of the cycle, too.


I could go on and on. The complexities of Starr’s life far outweigh those seen in All American Boys, and because of that, I think The Hate U Give is the better--perhaps even the more realistic--book. Unfortunately, it’s also significantly longer, so in terms of teaching, it probably makes sense to stick with All American Boys for now. For kids who love All American Boys, though (and many do), The Hate U Give is a perfect recommendation for an independent read.

July 24, 2021


Sula by Toni Morrison is another example of Morrison’s writing prowess. The care she takes to describe moments in unique detail, the frankness of her dialogue, the complexity of her characters--I am in awe over and over again. I don’t know why, but I keep coming back to this image early in the book: “They are going to raze the Time and a Half Pool Hall, where feet in long tan shoes once pointed down from chair rungs” (3). Of all the descriptions of a pool hall, for her to include this one as its summary...I don’t know. It’s simple. It’s memorable.  It somehow shows joy and loneliness in a single breath.


Or when Sula’s mother Hannah asks her own mother Eva if she loved her kids, if she ever played with them when they were young: “Play? Wasn’t nobody playin’ in 1895. Just ‘cause you got it good now you think it was always this good? 1895 was a killer, girl...I set in that house five days with you and Pearl and Plum and three beets, you snake-eyed ungrateful hussy. What would I look like leapin’ ‘round that little old room playin’ with youngins with three beets to my name?” (68). The nature of motherhood is a reflection of need and of the times, social expectations, life and death. Eva did what she needed to do to keep her kids alive, and Hannah wanted more. The need and the want are not mutually exclusive, but they do keep mother and daughter from fully understanding each other.


Sula herself is altogether her own. She is true only to her self and has high expectations of others. She expects non-conformity, disregards loyalty, and in her self-indulgence sets the community against her. How dare she not abide by prescribed rules for black women in society? Yet their hatred bounces off her like pebbles off a carapace. Her boldness has its weak spots, and it has its victims, but in the end, it’s impossible not to admire her iconoclasm.

July 7, 2021


Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie is a story for adults who need an injection of whimsy. It’s a romp and an adventure and a reminder that weaving lightness into our day-to-day lives strengthens us.


Haroun and his storytelling father Rashid end up in Gup City where they learn of the sickening of the Sea of Stories, the source and maintainer of the world’s words. Haroun has always been a story skeptic, but once in the city, he learns of their importance and works with newfound friends to try and save his father’s livelihood and the sanctity of storytelling everywhere.

June 15, 2021


In When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka, violence permeates the prose like a whisper. So much is said in the unsaid, in the quiet. The internment of Japanese Americans happened one spring day in 1942, then years later it unhappened. But for those who were forced from their homes, who went from being classified as “neighbor” to classified as “enemy,” the internment happened like a punch. It robbed them of their identities, their energy, their relationships, and their joy.


Using varying viewpoints of the mother, the son, the daughter, and the husband in an unnamed Japanese American family, Otsuka shows how three years and five months can stagnate into a single minute, how it can stretch into a lonely hundred years. She takes a family and breaks it open, revealing its tender parts that include both the gentleness of love and the ache of desperation. She exposes what “othering” does to a mother, to a child, to a father. And she reminds us that we are all at once individuals and part of a family, a country, a race, part of what we want to be, and part of what people think we are.


The first three chapters are slow, made up of empty days in the internment camp, forever waiting for something, repeating each day like clockwork, but the last two chapters are fast, vigorous, beautiful. They are worth the wait, like coming home after a long, long journey.

June 1, 2021


In Claire of the Sea Light, Edwidge Danticat animates the sea. It is a provider, a killer, a comforter, a mourner. The story follows Claire and her father. Believing he is unable to take care of her alone after mother’s death in childbirth, Claire’s father considers his options. Does he send her to live with her mother’s family? Give her to a wealthy matron? Keep her with him in his fishing shack by the sea? Claire is quiet and bright and inscrutable to her father. She wants only to be with him, but he does not know it.


This is the first Edwidge Danticat novel I have read, and I got tangled up in the multiple characters that were introduced, some of whom did not seem to have a direct connection to the central story. Nonetheless, I enjoyed living by the sea in Haiti for a few weeks, exploring the streets of Ville Rose, and watching a father and daughter love each other ferociously in silence. 


May 10, 2021


This may be it. After months of searching, Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler may be the book I pull into my English curriculum. It’s somber and gruesome (think: children roasting a human leg over a campfire, turning it by the foot as it sizzles), but it is also innovative, forward-thinking, and hopeful. Lauren Olamina is a believable teenage protagonist--creative and contemplative, a bit rebellious and occasionally filled with self-doubt. The religion that she develops--Earthseed--reflects the power that humans can hold within the reality of the world as long as they pay attention to the effects of their actions, as long as they are willing to accept that God is change.


Of the book, Butler wrote, “It is to look at where we are now, what we are doing now, and to consider where some of our current behaviors and unattended problems might take us” (337). To that end, the book addresses the results of climate change, drug use, income inequality, and the heedlessness of police and politicians. It also provides pathways to change, including how to build trust, how to build a community, and how to survive when the world around you has fallen apart. The book feels particularly important right now, at a time when we are looking to the younger generations to fix a world that we were too lazy or unaware or scared or indecisive to fix ourselves. For my students, the tenets of Earthseed may guide their path to a better world.


April 23, 2021


In my mind, Isabel Allende’s name is synonymous with “magical realism,” so I found it interesting that The House of Spirits felt heavy on the realism and light on the magical. Perhaps more apropos would be to call it “spiritual realism,” as many of the book’s characters have a unique psychic connection with people and events of the past and future. The beauty of the writing is that Allende makes the magical elements feel possible because the rest of the plot is anchored to the authenticity of living.


The book is expansive in its scope: it uses alternating points of view to cover multiple generations and conflicts, government upheaval, and the great gap between the rich and the poor. It zooms in to look a single love affair then zooms out to show a country at war with itself. It explores lust and tenderness, manipulation, fury and hatred. One of the narrators, Esteban Trueba, is unbearable with his egotism and moodiness, but his granddaughter, who also narrates, adores him, and through her eyes, it is hard not to appreciate his unwavering love for her.


My favorite part of the book is one of its “zoom out” moments when Allende examines the quick rise and fall of communism in the book’s unnamed South American country. Through Trueba, she ultimately shows how a country governed by the brutal and inept harms rich and poor alike and how the theory that “Those who always win are going to win again” does not have to be the default reality--that if people join together to fight for justice, justice will prevail. Though the book was published in the early 1980s, it still feels relevant to the world today.

March 14, 2021


I frankly do not know how to write a review of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. Better, I think, is to share his words here in short form so that you will be enticed to pick up the book yourself and cry and be ashamed and learn.


“Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear” (8).


“White people, who had robbed black people of their liberty and who profited by this theft every hour that they lived, had no moral ground on which to stand. They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law--in a word, power. But it was a criminal power, to be feared but not respected, and to be outwitted in any way whatever. And those virtues preached but not practiced by the white world were merely another means of holding Negroes in subjection” (23).


“But I had been in the pulpit too long and I had seen too many monstrous things. I don’t refer merely to the glaring fact that the minister eventually acquires houses and Cadillacs while the faithful continue to scrub floors and drop their dimes and quarters and dollars into the plate. I really mean that there was no love in the church. It was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair. The transfiguring power of the Holy Ghost ended when the service ended, and salvation stopped at the church door. When we were told to love everybody, I had thought that that meant everybody. But no. It applied only to those who believed as we did, and it did not apply to white people at all” (39).


““But what was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved toward me?” (40)


“To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread” (43).


“Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves” (44).


“It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being...must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church. If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him” (47).


“The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless” (55).


“That sinners have always, for American Negroes, been white is a truth we needn’t labor, and every American Negro, therefore, risks having the gates of paranoia close on him. In a society that is entirely hostile...it begins to be almost impossible to distinguish a real from a fancied injury...All doormen, for example, and all policemen have by now, for me, become exactly the same, and my style with them is designed simply to intimidate them before they can intimidate me. No doubt I am guilty of some injustice here, but it is irreducible, since I cannot risk assuming that the humanity of these people is more real to them than their uniforms” (68).


“How can one, however, dream of power in any other terms than in the symbols of power?” (80)


“I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them...Whoever debases others is debasing himself” (83).


“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have” (91).


“White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want” (94).


“It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate” (100).

February 19, 2021


Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng was a great vacation read. The pacing is quick, the characters enchanting, and the storyline captivating. Set in Shaker Heights, Ohio--the first planned community--the story follows The Richardsons, a white family headed by an organized, hard-working mother who believes that following the rules inevitably leads to success. When an artist and her daughter move into Mrs. Richardson’s rental property, the Richardsons’ four children become enamored with them. Their resourcefulness and honesty are uncommon traits in Shaker Heights, and the Richardson kids are drawn to their unconventional way of living.


The novel addresses how we confront an otherness that makes us question our own ideals, as well as various notions of motherhood. In some ways, it is a breezier version of Toni Morrison’s Paradise. In each book, a community and a life is planned out meticulously only to have that rigidity become the downfall of the people within.

February 4, 2021


In Paradise, Toni Morrison sets out to explore what she called a “race-specific/raceless” language and society. Until I read the book, I could not imagine exactly what that meant. Having read it, I grasp the idea a bit more, but as is the case with much of Morrison’s writing, I would like to read the book in a college class with a knowledgeable professor leading me through the dense forest of language and meaning.


The book’s focal point is a town called Ruby whose residents are descendents of men and women who escaped slavery but who were too poor to be accepted by black communities that were already settled and well off. The idea for the story came to Morrison as she was reviewing the first-established African American newspapers, which contained advertisements for growing black communities. They welcomed new members but with the subtext, “If you have nothing, stay away” (xii). These new communities were already at work creating a hierarchy, not dissimilar from the white-controlled one they were trying to escape. 


In the book, the poor, future residents of Ruby forge ahead, determined to make their own society--one in which former slaves like themselves can flourish. And they do. Ruby becomes self-sustaining and financially stable; it is removed from the white society that enslaved them and the black societies that shunned them. However, as generations pass, a restlessness ripples through the paradise they have built, and the betrayal of the ideals of the original founders is held in the balance. In the end, Morrison reflects, “How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it” (306). 


As always, Morrison’s writing is wise, beautiful, and often inscrutable. She weaves close third with close third with such rapidity that I occasionally got a sort of empathy whiplash. But with that closeness, I also saw clearly the complexities of community-building: the hopes of the founders stretched taut against the dreams of future generations, the greed that walks in the footprints of power, the othering that makes the community feel safe. The book is both a hope and a warning: let us build a community and be proud of what we’ve made but not forget to question its growth and changes, and to never, ever assume that it can be a paradise on earth.

January 3, 2020


Ijeoma Oluo lays the truth about race at your feet in So You Want to Talk About Race then gives you the tools to pick it up, examine it, and do something with it. Early on, she warns, “You’re going to screw this up. You’re going to screw this up royally. More than once. I’m sorry, I wish I could say that reading this book would guarantee that you’d never leave a conversation about race feeling like you’ve gotten it all wrong and made everything worse. But I can’t. It’s going to happen” (45). 


I appreciate her honesty. It’s a good reminder that the most important conversations are the hard ones, the ones that make you feel heavy, or sick, or scared. But often those conversations are the ones--if entered with genuine respect and a willingness to listen--that will result in a stronger understanding of the topic at hand. Race is hard to talk about--for white people because we’ve been taught that white is default, so what’s to talk about? And for people of color because of the daily impacts of systemic racism and microaggressions on their lives.


Speaking of microaggressions, Oluo explains them in a way I had never heard. Before her explanation, I did not really understand the term. Hearing the word come casually out of the mouths of my 15-year-old students, I thought it was an overdramatized millennial little nothing. I was wrong. Here’s her explanation: “Microaggressions are more than just annoyances. The cumulative effect of these constant reminders that you are ‘less than’ does real psychological damage. Regular exposure to microaggressions causes a person of color to feel isolated and invalidated. The inability to predict where and when microaggressions may occur leads to hypervigilance, which can then lead to anxiety disorders and depression” (169). Oluo lists some of the subconscious comments that people make that may seem small but, when heard regularly, become ostracizing: “That’s so ghetto.” “Your name is too difficult for me. Do you have a nickname?” “Do all your kids have the same dad?” “Are you the nanny?” The list goes on. It made me think about the microaggressions that I have perpetrated. I’m embarrassed. And I should be. I can do better.


Oluo has some simple advice: Have discussions about race in your local community (in schools, in politics, in policing, in your workplace). Be vocal. Get uncomfortable. Listen. Push for change.

December 6, 2020


In his memoir Sigh, Gone, Phuc Tran examines how the influences of his childhood--his punk rock friends, his bookish teachers, his intense father--impact his evolving identity. It is a book about fitting in, but it is also a book about figuring out how to hold two truths in one hand, to be all that your body and mind and heart want you to be without viewing any of those wants as contradictory. The book is smart, readable, and honest.


As a Vietnamese-American kid growing up in a small town in Pennsylvania, Tran experiences racism, from the community and even from his good friends, but mostly he uses his sense of humor to laugh it off or push it away. Still, it is tiring for him to always be on guard against sleights and slurs, even as he is working hard to stay on honor roll, hold down a job, participate in after school activities. In a word, be “All-American.” In order to assimilate--and try to be the smartest person in the room--Tran reads. Inspired by The Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman, he devours all the books that white academics do. And he loves them.


Each chapter title is one of the books that has most influenced Tran. Throughout the chapter, he applies the themes of the book to his life at the moment. It is a wonderful way to show how his love of literature ripples through his life. As a reader, I enjoyed remembering the plots and themes of the books along with Tran and thinking about the way literature can surprise and inspire us.

November 15, 2020

Black Girl Unlimited by Echo Brown mixes truth and sorcery, grief and joy, limits and the limitless. The story follows Brown’s life growing up in Cleveland where many of the people around her wore sadness and hurt like a black veil. Some people suffocated under their veils, others tried to protect themselves from it by putting up a hard shell. Brown, however, was determined to escape the black veil and still remain soft and vulnerable, shell-free.

That determination paid off as she worked hard in school, surrounded herself with friends who understood her drive, and took guidance from others when she felt lost. Even when the black veil came down hard on her, she was able to push it off again with the help of some seasoned sorcerers who had experienced their own share of grief. “My mother wrapped her arms around both of us. Her shell had dropped and she became a nest, like my father on the night of the fire. She is rarely a nest. I wish she were always a nest” (73).

Although my writerly self was critical of some of the dialogue at the beginning of the story that read more like a plot summary than believable conversation, the plot itself was strong enough to propel me forward. By the end, I was glad I did, as the story brightened and blossomed and pulled my heartstrings to tears.

October 27, 2020

“Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done” (Stevenson 17). Lawyer, author, and incredible human Bryan Stevenson has helped dozens of convicts fight for reduced sentences in a criminal justice system that targets people who are of color, poor, or disabled. Just Mercy examines many of the cases that Stevenson has taken up and shows a criminal justice system that needs an extreme overhaul in order to be fair and transparent.

The focus case in the book is that of Walter McMillian, a black lumberjack from Monroe County, Alabama who was convicted of killing a white woman and sentenced to death row. This despite the fact that there was no solid evidence to justify the conviction. In the book, Stevenson details the multiple cover-ups that Alabama authorities used to convict a man of a crime he did not commit in order to appease a public that was becoming increasingly agitated by the unsolved murder. The case spits in the face of dignity, virtue, and justice. 

Part of the horror of this case for me is that it took place within my lifetime. When I was ten years old, McMillian was sitting on death row, listening to fellow inmates scream in the electric chair. This is not an old story, a before-our-time or before-Civil-Rights story. This miscarriage of justice happened mere decades ago, and it is still happening. People are over-sentenced for non-violent crimes, for being young and stupid, for being poor and desperate, for being humans without support for their financial needs, their mental health needs, or their addictions.

We can do better. Bryan Stevenson has helped us do better. He has fought for reduced sentences for juvenile offenders and the mentally ill. He has fought against the death penalty and against wrongful convictions. He has brought to light the need for mercy in a system that thrives on punishment. He writes, “I am persuaded that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice. I’ve come to believe that the true measure of our commitment to justice, fairness, and equality cannot be measured by how we treat the rich, the respected, and the privileged among us. The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned” (18). 

Please consider supporting Stevenson’s mission by donating to the Equal Justice Initiative. You can learn more about their cause at eji.org.

October 12, 2020

Dear Martin by Nic Stone is a quick read, but by the time you finish it, you will feel like you ran a marathon. Stone piles discomfort upon discomfort upon discomfort, not letting you catch your breath or unclench your teeth. In the opening scene, black teenager Justyce McAllister gets racially profiled by police as he tries to convince his ex-girlfriend not to drive home drunk at 3 AM. He escapes the situation unharmed except for the remembered tightness of the handcuffs around his wrists. In an attempt to make sense of the situation and continue to keep his head up in the face of injustice, Justyce starts writing letters to Dr. Martin Luther King.

But the letters do not prevent the injustices from continuing to happen. Soon, Justyce wonders how Dr. King was able to keep his cool while aggressive and ignorant people questioned his worth and the white man’s system seemed built specifically to ensure that black men failed.

Using a multi-genre structure, Stone takes us on a six-month journey with this pensive teenager who is trying to be his best self and find success in a world trying to keep him down. By the end of the book, you will be exhausted from the marathon but glad you participated in it.

October 6, 2020

If you need to clean out your tear ducts, read Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward. The novel uses a multi-narrator structure to follow a young, black woman, her parents, her white boyfriend, and her mixed race children as they navigate an unwelcoming world. Leonie’s parents hold the family together--they are strong and emotionally stable despite the loss of their son in a tragic accident--but as Leonie watches her mother die of cancer and as she leaves her father behind to take her kids on a road trip to pick up her boyfriend from jail, that stability begins to disintegrate.

Leonie’s thirteen-year-old son Jojo has the strength of his grandfather and the heart of his grandmother. He cares for his three-year-old sister like a mother because Leonie is either too high or too selfish to do it. “...He thinks he could curl around her, make his skeleton and flesh into a building to protect her from adults, from the great reach of the sky, the vast expanse of the grass-ridden earth, shallow with graves” (133). The bond between the two kids will lift and break your heart on every page. 

Ward is a priestess of the pen. Her language is striking in its beauty and impressive in its depth. Barely a page went by when I was not placing my hand on my heart, touched by the magic of her words. But she does more than that, too. She excavates bodies from the earth, black bodies, and she brings them into the world of the living and makes us look at the horror of those losses--the incredible unfairness, the brutality. She also shows the earth as a provider, a healer. “Home is about the earth. Whether the earth open up to you. Whether it pull you so close the space between you and it melt and y’all one and it beats like your heart” (183).  

Please read this book. It will open you up.

September 4, 2020

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison is pain. It is boldness. It is the exploration of empathy and otherness and the human desire to belong. Pecola Breedlove exists on the lowest tier of the pecking order in 1930s America: a poor black girl. And yet she has the courage to ask her pastor for the one thing she believes will change her station in life: blue eyes. The eyes she sees in the face of the Hollywood starlet Shirley Temple, of the popular Baby Doll toy, and of the white toddler her mother adores. Pecola understands the injustice of the world enough to think she can change her life with the granting of this one small wish but not enough to realize that the prayer will not be answered.

Morrison, with her writing’s intricate language and careful cadence, does something that the authors I have taught to my high schoolers in the past do not: she addresses individual ills. Golding, Huxley, and Orwell critique society in their works, but they don’t address the complexity of the individual’s role in society’s dysfunction. At the same time as she addresses systemic racism, generational trauma, and conformity, Morrison addresses abuse, incest, and the crippling desire to belong. 

Unfortunately, her incisiveness is also what makes The Bluest Eye more difficult to teach than Lord of the Flies, Brave New World, or Animal Farm. Her writing is emotionally tumultuous. It doesn’t explore the precarious human condition from a distance, it analyzes it up close. Morrison puts you in the room when the rape occurs, she lays bare the mind of the predator, she burdens the innocent with desperation. 

I feel ill-equipped to teach that tumult. I would have to have a social worker on standby to help me deal with the potential fallout of re-traumatizing students that have experienced some of the described violence firsthand. So I retreat to the safety of broad, societal brushstrokes where feelings are not involved and the only pain felt while reading is the sense of despair that the white man has won again.

August 19, 2020

The focus of the memoirs in Shaking the Tree 2, edited by Marni Freedman and Tracy J. Jones, is “Things We Don’t Talk About.” I picked this book up to try to imbue new life into the memoir unit with which I often start the school year. Topics in the anthology range from secret siblings to gay porn production, from the stress that builds up due to unchallenged microagressions to a near-death experience that renews a connection with an old friend.

The editors have compiled approximately thirty pieces, mostly by women, some by people of color, that are short, clear, and engaging. Most are six pages or fewer, and although some lack an ending that satisfies, the majority of the pieces contain at least a semblance of resolution, even if we readers have to guess at what comes next. I plan to pick a few for all students to read then provide others that students can choose from. Because they address moments from the authors’ lives that have led to self-discovery or that have healed fractured relationships, these short memoirs will be great models for my students as they write their own stories.

A few of my favorites were:

 (The titles sum up each story as well as I could.)

August 14, 2020

It sounded too good to be true that Jason Reynolds was going to massage Ibram X. Kendi’s difficult but important research on the history of racism in America into a book digestible for high school students, but Stamped delivers. Although I have not read Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which Stamped is based on, I am familiar with his writing style from How to Be an Anti-Racist. It’s dense and potentially inscrutable to a fifteen-year-old who may not have the patience to read more than a tweet’s worth of words in a sitting. Reynolds, on the other hand, who wrote All American Boys, When I Was the Greatest, and other young adult novels, knows how to write for teenagers. I absolutely love and agree with the acknowledgement that Reynolds addresses to young people at the end of Stamped: “All of you deserve thanks. All of you deserve acknowledgement. All of you deserve to know that you are in fact the antidote to anti-Blackness, xenophobia, homophobia, classism, sexism, and the other cancers that you have not caused but surely have the potential to cure…[Y]ou’re far more open and empathetic than the generations before you” (252).

Clearly, this is the exact person that you want to deliver difficult information to America’s children about our racist history. He loves young people, and he wants them to have the knowledge they need to make America a better place. 

In the book, Reynolds takes great care to show awareness of his audience, both with his conversational tone and with the space he gives readers to think. Occasionally, he slows it down, actually writes the words “PAUSE...UNPAUSE” to give his young readers the opportunity to process an especially heavy point. Despite these pauses, the book moves quickly. I’m a slow reader, and an especially slow reader of history books, but I blew through Stamped. In fact, I wish there had been more. I look forward now to reading Stamped from the Beginning to see some of the additional details that Reynolds filtered out to make Stamped more accessible to teenagers. At the end of the book, Reynolds includes an excellent reading list that I plan to use as a resource as I continue trying to crack the canon.

Finally lands my question, should I teach this? Really, I think Stamped would work better in a history classroom. A history teacher could lend more historical context to the people and events that Reynolds discusses. He proclaims over and over that this is NOT a history book. And it’s not in the sense that it doesn’t give you scoliosis and gloss over the more atrocious decisions of our predecessors, but it would fit nicely into a social studies curriculum that has not historically done a great job of making history accessible, relevant, and inclusive. At the same time, I have not done a great job of making literature accessible, relevant, and inclusive in my English classroom either, so maybe I should bite the bullet of discomfort that comes from teaching out of my subject bubble and dive in. 

August 4, 2020

Heavy, a memoir by Kiese Laymon written as a letter to his mother, could not have been more aptly named. As I read, I felt like I was wading through morass. It was morass made up of my own ignorance--ignorance of black abundance, of 100-pound weight fluctuations, of creative, abusive, enlightened, gambling-addicted, renowned parent-professors, and of black boys so sad they cannot cry. Until reading Heavy, I didn’t think about, accept, or want to believe that some black people lump all white people together just like some white people lump all black people together. Of course they do. Laymon himself lumps, but he also differentiates. “I didn’t hate white folk. I didn’t fear white folk. I wasn’t easily impressed or even annoyed by white folk because even before I met actual white folk, I met every protagonist, antagonist, and writer of all the stories I ever read in first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. At the same time, I met Wonder Woman, the narrator on The Wonder Years, Ricky from Silver Spoons, Booger from Revenge of the Nerds, Spock from Star Trek, Mallory from Family Ties, damn near all the coaches and owners of my favorite teams” (72). How could a black child in the Deep South go through eight years of schooling and TV-watching and not meet a black main character? How? 

But it happened, and it is still happening. 

Remember this, remember this, remember this: Grandmama says, “The worst kinds of teachers be the teachers that teach other folk how to be like them” (175). And from Mama, “My job as a teacher is to help [students] breathe with excellence and discipline in the classroom. The ones that love you, they become what you model. Don’t forget that. Help them breathe by modeling responsible love in the classroom every single day. The most important thing a teacher can do is give their students permission to be loving and excellent” (180).

I do not feel lighter now that I have finished reading Heavy, but I do feel motivated to put the protagonists, antagonists, and writers that Laymon was not given to read when he was a student into the hands of mine. I will not teach my students to be like me. I will model responsible love. I will give my students permission to be their loving, excellent selves.

July 21, 2020

After gnawing on Toni Morrison’s essays for weeks, reading Not So Pure and Simple, a YA novel by Lamar Giles, was like partaking in light refreshment. It was a quick, easy read, not troubled by double entendre or layers of metaphor. It did, however, tackle the heavy, all-too-common subject of female objectification, and it did so in a way that was subtle and believable. The book starts a little slow, setting the scene in a small town where church and school are the main social outlets for the town’s teens, but by the end, I was eagerly turning pages in order to see how the story’s complications would be resolved and crying from the honesty of it all. 

As I consider adding it (or a book like it) to my class curriculum, an old debate surfaces: what’s more important in English class? Books framed around contemporary topics that will engage students? Or books with “literary merit” and linguistic prowess (but whose themes are not necessarily easily accessible to fifteen-year-olds)? Ideally, a book added to the curriculum would check both of those boxes, be written by a person of color, and not be passé in two years, but the question is, what is that book? If there are any suggestions out there, please contact me. I have a growing list of books to read, and I would love help narrowing my focus. What book has challenged you and enriched your life? What book do you wish you had read in school or do you think your kids or grandkids should read? Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

July 15, 2020

The Source of Self-Regard is a compilation of essays, speeches, and reflections by Toni Morrison. The book is breathtaking. With her own work, the work of others, and the world itself, she turns over each leaf, follows its veins, puts the leaf back on the tree, watches it fall, then reassesses the fall and the leaf. I have never seen someone do such a thorough examination of their own work. In her books, each word is heavy with significance, each sentence deliberately formed and placed precisely because she toiled to make it so. Her writing is writing for the ages. 

I particularly enjoyed Morrison’s meditations on her writing process, whether it was how she spent three months writing the first four pages of Sula or how she worked in Paradise to create a community that was culture-specific but race-free. She summarizes her approach to writing by saying, “I rewrite a lot, over and over again, so that it looks like I never did. I try to make it look like I never touched it, and that takes a lot of time and a lot of sweat” (245). She wrote each of her books with such intention, not a gut feeling or a whim, but an idea that she examined from all angles before submitting it to a publisher. She says, “Writing is, after all, an act of language, its practice. But first of all it is an effort of the will to discover” (182). Evident in The Source of Self-Regard is that Morrison spends an incredible amount of time discovering. Frequently, I needed to reread sentences because they were so thick with meaning. She worked diligently to discover, and she transferred that discovery to others through her art. “[T]he impulse to do and revere art is an ancient need--whether on cave walls, one’s own body, a cathedral or a religious rite, we hunger for a way to articulate who we are and what we mean” (56).

We are lucky that Morrison lived for 88 years to share her discoveries with us, to help us articulate who we are and what we mean. The Source of Self-Regard is a book that I will go back to again and again to help make sense of the world.

June 10, 2020

In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez is a timely novel even though it was first published in 1994 and focuses on events in the Dominican Republic of the 1940s. In the book, Alvarez creates fictional lives for the real Mirabal sisters who were revolutionaries working to overthrow Rafael Trujillo, their tyrannical leader. In the postscript, Alvarez explains that she did not have enough biographical information or expertise to write the true story of the Mirabal sisters but that she hopes to accurately capture their humanity and spirit in her fictional work. She writes, “A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart” (324).

What I found most riveting about the work was the way in which Alvarez portrays each of the sisters coming to be a part of the revolution. The call to revolt did not come to them all at once, and it did not call to them to participate in the same way. Each sister needed different amounts of time and experience to realize what it meant to be free, what it meant to set a country free, and what their part in that revolution for freedom would look like. 

And so it is today. There are revolutionaries in America who have realized for decades that no citizen is free until we are all free. Before the murder of George Floyd or Philando Castile or Trayvon Martin, they were calling for change and working to make their voices heard about the inequities still omnipresent in The Land of the Free. They wrote letters to Congressmen, kept blogs, protested. They educated themselves and others. For some people to open their eyes and see what those revolutionaries have been aware of for so long, it has taken a national pandemic and even more black lives lost in a system that is built to lose them. 

Julia Alvarez, early in the book, shows one of the sisters trying to free a rabbit from its cage. “But [the rabbit] wouldn’t budge. She was used to her little pen. I kept slapping her, harder each time, until she started whimpering like a scared child. I was the one hurting her, insisting she be free” (11). Some revolutionaries do the slapping, some do the educating, others take part with their wallets, their bodies, their time. What’s important is to do something, to step forward, even if it hurts, out of our little pens.

May 21, 2020

When Chen Chen came as a guest faculty member to the Stonecoast MFA Program during my final residency, I was impressed by the poetry he shared. I also loved hearing him speak during a seminar on challenging the literary canon. He talked about how reading books that affirm your cultural identity can make you feel less lonely or help you overcome internalized racism. One of the reasons I started this blog was inspired by this comment by Chen--I want to help my students find books that affirm their cultural identities.

When I Grow Up I Want to Be A List of Further Possibilities is a compilation of poems that many of my students would adore. The poems touch on difficult moments (coming out, breakups, loss, leaving) but always with a lightness that makes the moment seem like a manageable hiccup in the body of life. “Why can’t you see me? Why can’t I stop/ needing you to see me? For someone who looks like you/ to look at me, even as the coffee accident/ is happening to my second favorite shirt?” (69). Chen’s poems use straightforward language, and while they often reflect youthfulness, they just as often cut to a depth of agelessness: “Why did I never consider how different spring could smell, feel,/ elsewhere? First light, last scent, lost/ country. First & deepest severance that should have/ prepared me for all others” (27). 

Many of my students need what Chen is offering in these poems: clear words, levity, and hope. I’m so glad that I had the opportunity to read Chen’s work and to hear him speak at Stonecoast.

May 10, 2020

Rarely do I pick up a book solely due to its title, but that’s exactly what I did with On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong. It’s no wonder that Vuong’s novel has a name that you want to wrap yourself in; his first book, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, was a book of poetry, and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous reads more like a poem than a novel. It is plot-thin and image-rich. It cuts quickly, sometimes disorientingly, between places and time periods, but it also leaves you with salt on your tongue after losing your virginity under tobacco leaves drying in a hot barn. 

The novel is structured as a letter to the narrator’s illiterate mother. The structure is loose, and the story vacillates between epistle and incident, Vietnam and America, love of mother and love of man. As I read, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the novel was more memoir than fiction, and after hearing an interview with Vuong on On Being with Krista Tippett, that feeling was confirmed. Somehow, knowing the book is based on Vuong’s life makes some of the passages that I marked even more poignant: “I never wanted to build a ‘body of work,’ but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work” (175). Or, “Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence--but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it” (231).

In the interview with Tippett, Vuong’s quiet, confident words rang as eloquently as his written ones. Although the structure of the book occasionally baffled the left side of my brain, the right side was enchanted by his illustrative language, and there are scenes from the book that have left an indelible impression on my mind’s eye.

April 15, 2020

The closer I got to the last page of Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the slower I read. I simply did not want it to end. Adichie's understanding of people, and her ability to translate that understanding precisely onto the page, is a rare gift. "It brought to him a disorienting strangeness, because his mind had not changed at the same pace as his life, and he felt a hollow space between himself and the person he was supposed to be" (33). Or "There were people who were born with an inability to be tangled up in dark emotions, in complications...For such people, Obinze felt both admiration and boredom" (308).

As I read, I marked such lines with sticky notes in order to go back and reread them to inspire such precision and astuteness in my own writing. As her main character, Ifemelu, moves from Nigeria to America and back to Nigeria, I moved with her. Through Ifemelu's interactions in both countries, I got to know the cultures of Lagos, Philadelphia, Princeton, Abuja, and other places, and I got to see the superficiality, depth, passion, and longing that pervades all of those cities. Adichie is not sparing in her critique of America, or Nigeria, or the people of either country, but she's not sparing in her love for both places and their people either.

Reading this book was like watching the hollow space between a person and who they are meant to be fill with a bounteous contentment. It was a joy to behold.

April 1, 2020

My favorite substitute teacher at school brought hit by a farm by catherine friend to me. “It’s about these two lesbians who own a farm. I thought the kids might like it.” By “the kids,” he meant the members of the school’s Gay-Straight-Transgender-Alliance, which I advise. I knew he meant the GSTA kids because he motioned with his elbow to the enormous glittery G-S-T-A letters on the back wall of my classroom. I could tell he was a little embarrassed and a little proud to be recommending the book to me. He’s a white, cis-gendered, heterosexual male.

I liked the book, but I’m not sure I would recommend it to my students. It’s heavy on adult relationship stressors. Of course, I liked this part--it’s nice to see a relationship that is portrayed honestly, including the petty fights, daily misunderstandings, and digging-in-your-heels “I’m right” arguments. But, from what I remember about being fifteen and from what I've observed from teaching fifteen-year-olds for over a decade, teenagers want to see more romance, more hair blowing in the wind, more hope for the purity of love.

The farming part of the book they might like--it comes with manure face-plants, baby lamb births, and guard-dog llamas, but those fun, funny, sweet aspects of the book might not redeem the book as a whole in their eyes. I’m glad I read it. I might recommend it to a few kids individually, but I don’t think it would make a great whole-class read.