Like a child’s ‘why’ the dance of flipped coins. A yes or no that triggers more, then more of a self-interrogative prose: ‘mining my own heart’ to understand the world. ‘Life involves making a decision so the spirits can rush in’ (186).
Heavy in weight with 800 works and heavy with 350 years plus of history and heavy with generations of wrong. Yet beautiful food, loved gardens and strong blood memory reaching back to healing. Black story power repelling the cesspool of white privilege.
Read in one sitting, exquisite observation, careful thought, the emplaced body thinking through place and time with an eye on knowing the self through motherways, lit up by ‘instances’ of intensity: ‘the world opening up as if through a great funnel’ (63).
To read of a friend like Jesse is to revel in the friends you have and mourn for those who are no longer with you. This book sticks. Gentle incisions, brutal descriptions, prose veering to Hazzard ‘on a hot ticking day’ (5).
A portrait of white invasion, asking ‘how many animals have the freedom of independence, in location and influence, from humans’ (55)? Beautifully told and felt with care, a story of ‘letting the living and dead go free’ (247). RIP glorious Dingo Bold.
A book to talk about such a thing? A contrivance, this quest, but also a divine self-conquest where ‘God speaking is a verb, an act, but God in perfect self-communication, in love within the trinity, is silence and therefore is silence’ (221).
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Small delicate chapters that create a world, each chapter head so precise in all creating a story, a plot of the reader’s own making. Reading alongside, accompanying these thoughts just as ‘the little girl hums strange songs to herself all the while’ as the narrator and her father play their odd game (116).
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Mental illnesses like ____ create and hold definitions. Living with ____ is more of a slog than reading with it. ‘You were done, you were done, you were done with being hopeless.’ (329). Would that the doing could ever be so easy.
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In awe of writerly precision even more this second read, after loving the first bite of its hard honesty. ‘I tried to figure out if I felt calmer with a blanket over my head. No I did not was the answer’ (5).
A Crarcow of a novel. Proof that young adult is a porous category. This ghost story brings back the scariest moments of the past, reminds you they were never gone. Sleeping comes with a risk. Burn fires bright. Sing away the fright.
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