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December/January Reads--The city We Became by N.k. Jemisin and Long Division by Kiese Laymon

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The City We Became: A Novel (The Great Cities,  Hardcover – March 24, 2020

by N. K. Jemisin
Meeting: January 30, 2023

In Manhattan, a young grad student gets off the train and realizes he doesn't remember who he is, where he's from, or even his own name. But he can sense the beating heart of the city, see its history, and feel its power.

In the Bronx, a Lenape gallery director discovers strange graffiti scattered throughout the city, so beautiful and powerful it's as if the paint is literally calling to her.

In Brooklyn, a politician and mother finds she can hear the songs of her city, pulsing to the beat of her Louboutin heels.

And they're not the only ones.

Every great city has a soul. Some are ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York? She's got six.

One of TIME Magazine's 100 Best Fantasy Books of all time
One of TIME Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of 2020
One of Vanity Fair's 15 Best Books of 2020
One of Amazon's Best Books of 2020
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Long Division: A Novel Paperback – June 1, 2021

by Kiese Laymon  (Author)

Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Fiction

From Kiese Laymon, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Heavy, comes a “funny, astute, searching” (The Wall Street Journal) debut novel about Black teenagers that is a satirical exploration of celebrity, authorship, violence, religion, and coming of age in post-Katrina Mississippi.

Written in a voice that’s alternately humorous, lacerating, and wise, Long Division features two interwoven stories. In the first, it’s 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, fourteen-year-old Citoyen “City” Coldson becomes an overnight YouTube celebrity. The next day, he’s sent to stay with his grandmother in the small coastal community of Melahatchie, where a young girl named Baize Shephard has recently disappeared.

Before leaving, City is given a strange book without an author called Long Division. He learns that one of the book’s main characters is also named City Coldson—but Long Division is set in 1985. This 1985-version of City, along with his friend and love interest, Shalaya Crump, discovers a way to travel into the future, and steals a laptop and cellphone from an orphaned teenage rapper called...Baize Shephard. They ultimately take these items with them all the way back to 1964, to help another time-traveler they meet to protect his family from the Ku Klux Klan.

City’s two stories ultimately converge in the work shed behind his grandmother’s house, where he discovers the key to Baize’s disappearance. Brilliantly “skewering the disingenuous masquerade of institutional racism” (Publishers Weekly), this dreamlike “smart, funny, and sharp” (Jesmyn Ward), novel shows the work that young Black Americans must do, while living under the shadow of a history “that they only gropingly understand and must try to fill in for themselves” (The Wall Street Journal).

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Comments

  1. 1299861March 6, 2023 at 12:14 PM

    I am posting this here first since I will not be able to join the group this afternoon (and the post has not been submitted yet).

    The writing is crisp and lyrical in Zoulfa Katouh’s book and it was a good opportunity to learn a little more about Syrian culture from a more personal perspective than news media. I could see using the book in my Writing Across Cultures books, since Katouh has a voice that I haven’t seen much of in my own travels and reading. I wish, however, I could find her short fiction–since my course is already packed with other author’s selections.

    I’m not a fan of schmaltzy books, and this book came dangerously close to being that, but the writing was pretty and meditative enough to overlook Salama’s journey of self-discovery and her troubling situations. I see that this book has been compared to The Book Thief–and I had the same reaction to that. Had it not been for the required reading, I would have skipped over this one. Glad I didn’t though.

    So: pretty or not, the story was interesting enough for realism. Humans survive awful events. Life goes on, blah, blah, blah. We find what we need in the rubble and wreckage. I think it would be interesting if Studio Ghibli would animate a version of this like the Prophet (2015).

    ReplyDelete
  2. AJEducatorMay 3, 2023 at 10:43 AM

    "Long Division is a serious book about race and love with a thread of humor running through it, emerging largely from Laymon's wordplay and the cultural gaps that exist between characters from the past, present and future. With roots in Southern and African American literature, Long Division is an historical novel that touches on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and a work of magical realism in the tradtion of Haruki Murakami." I found this book a pretty good read and could relate to some of the southern pieces due to my southern roots and growing up during the civil rights movement.

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