Author: JL

Harlem Shuffle & Crook Manifesto: Novels by Colson Whitehead

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Having read Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto, I cannot wait for the third novel in this series. Whitehead has me hooked on Ray Carney and Pepper, men you hate and yet can’t help but respect and care about. These novels had me reading through the night, damn whatever work I had the next day!

Harlem Shuffle is the first of the series, set in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It introduces the reader to the primary protagonist, Ray Carney, a black man who grew up and lives in Harlem, NYC. Carney is a successful business owner selling furniture, both new and gently used. His product is both legitimately sourced and… well, less so. The novel revolves around his world and the choices he has to make as a black man living in a white world, in a community where the lines between the licit and illicit are and have always been fluid. His wife, Elizabeth, for example, works in a travel agency who designs agendas for black folks in need of safe passage through white territory governed by Jim Crow legislation and prejudice. This is an era in which lynchings are common. A world before the American Civil Rights movements began.

The novel revolves around Carney and his immediate circle of friends, employees, and family, including his shiftless cousin, Freddie and his overbearing, “politics of respectability” in-laws. Split into three parts, each segment taking place three years apart, the novel is a collection of events that define Carney’s legitimate and less-legitimate career. Each segment revolves around a specific heist or… shall we say, project Carney gets involved in, willingly or otherwise.

Crook Manifesto follows the same format, except that it picks up where Harlem Shuffle leaves off but three years later in 1971. It is a new era in Harlem now. New York City is a different world than what it had been, but little has changed in Harlem. It is still a white man’s world, still a world in which the boundaries between the legal and illegal are fuzzy. Carney finds himself still doing the Harlem shuffle. Carney’s “projects” are criminal and noble, focused on vengeance and utterly righteous. He is a man of many talents and flaws, the kind of man everyone knows because that’s who we are: good and bad and everything in between.

The main attraction of the novel and the series as a whole is not the characters and their stories, or even the world of Harlem in the mid-20th century — though any one of these draws is enough for me — but Whitehead’s delicious prose and witty turn of phrase. Whitehead can evoke an image with just a handful of words, delivered with the kind of finesse only a slick Harlem player possesses; the prose is as smooth as the cons and crimes carried off in the novels. Whitehead’s words pack a punch, sharp and powerful like the ones Pepper throws. The words flow like music, like funk, and you, Reader, you will find yourself dancing to Whitehead’s beat long into the night.

The characters, and Whitehead’s smart crafting of their stories, does warrant mention. Carney, Pepper, Freddie, Marie, Munson, Zippo, Elizabeth, and Big Mike are each their own literary masterpieces. These are real people, visible and tangible. There is an enormous cast, but as the novels build, the reader will find that they make up the urban village that is Harlem, this closed and vulnerable world, an enclave of blackness in white New York. In Harlem Shuffle we fall in love with these characters, understand them and their desires. In Crook Manifesto Whitehead reprises them and we get a deeper view into their vulnerabilities, their powers, their strengths.

Whitehead’s attention to history and the culture of the past is also commendable. Events of the past are woven into the fabric of the story, as it was in reality, a necessary foundation for the way things end up shaking out. No world, even Black Harlem, exists in a vacuum; the events of New York politics as much as Civil Rights events happening in other parts of the country reverberate in Harlem, in the Carney’s living room, in Carney’s furniture showroom.

I. Cannot. Wait. For the next installment in this series.

After the Funeral and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley

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After the Funeral and Other Stories
by Tessa Hadley

What an amazing collection of short stories! I couldn’t find one that I did not enjoy or that did not make me wonder about my own life, those around me, and just the state of humanity as a whole. Readers who enjoy the creativity and perspective of Margaret Atwood or the incisiveness of Meg Wolitzer are likely to find Hadley’s After the Funeral and Other Stories equally as well-written, equally as insightful into the human experience. And like Atwood and Wolitzer, there is an undercurrent of the uncomfortable in this collection of Hadley’s work, something that makes one wonder about the moral state of our species.

The stories range wide in terms of their narrators and protagonists. In some stories the narrator is a child, in others adult women, adult men. These are stories that clip a slice of a group of someones lives: some pinpoint a long moment of grief or the sharp cut of a sudden loss. There is death and all the attendant fears of delivering the news of death, of getting on after the loss, of not feeling much of anything and what that means about oneself. There are stories here of indifference, a death of a different kind amongst our very social species. There are stories of disloyalty and infidelity, yet again, another kind of death. Indeed, the title of the collection, while signaling the title of one of its stories, is also telling of the content of the collection. After the Funeral and Other Stories is about what happens after there has been a resignation of some kind, a real or metaphorical death and the putting to bed of that corpse. In some of these tales, there is proof of an afterlife.

The characters in these stories do unexpected things, sometimes things that shouldn’t be done but are done anyway, with and without shame. Readers will find themselves wondering at the end of a story, “Oh, that’s just not right…. is it?” Or, is it? That is the draw of this collection of Hadley’s work.

Story aside, Hadley’s prose should also be an attraction for readers. This is delicious literary fiction; Hadley’s turns of phrase are crisp and succinct; the description of the squelch of plimsoll shoes in the rain is enough to invoke a multitude of elements necessary to the reader’s experience: a sense of activity, the image of the character, the mind of the narrator — and more profound, the poignancy of the moment.

I would normally list my favorite stories, but honestly, I enjoyed each and every one of these.

Olawu: A Novel by PJ Leigh

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Olawu: A Novel by PJ Leigh

Olawu appealed to my longing for a postcolonial canon. It delivered — and then some. The novel is reminiscent of the work by Yaa Gyasi, Chinua Achebe, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o; the language and the prose — sparse but evocative — is striking, the characters live and breathe, the story is inspiring. A whopping ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ for this young adult historical romance/fiction.

This novel disrupts modern colonial culture (in which we all live) on multiple levels:

  • As an independently published novel by an author of color, Olawu is a challenge to the institution of traditional publishing and gatekeeping that that system engenders.
  • As a novel set in a pre-colonial East African world, Olawu highlights the existence of East Africa, its diverse peoples, kingdoms, and communities as independent from European history. We do not need to mark African time according to European histories and events.
  • The eponymous protagonist is a strong woman and the novel draws attention to the role of women in pre-colonial East African society. In doing so, Olawu challenges euro-centric notions of gender, especially those imposed on women and womanhood.
  • The incorporation of Xhosa, KiSwahili, and Zulu words, phrases, and culture into the text is an act of postcolonial defiance. Given the Colonial weaponization of language, this act of text is a rejection of the primacy of English.

The novel is an East African bildungsroman, it follows its eponymous protagonist, Olawu as she comes of age, becomes a young woman, and finds her place in the world as an adult. It unfolds in what might be seen as three parts. The first focuses on her childhood and ambitions — and how the community into which she is born and raised deems her inferior on the basis of her gender. The second exposes Olawu and the reader to other possibilities, how women might be valued and how womanhood might be performed elsewhere. This is also the part of the novel where she struggles to understand herself, her desires, and the inevitable tension between conformity and personal fulfillment, especially when the latter flies in the face of cultural norms. The last part is when Olawu decides who she will be and how she negotiates with that tension to achieve her objectives. Romance (not sex) is woven into this story about a young woman shaping herself and the world around her, serving as the scales which Olawu must balance and ultimately tip one way or another.

A number of themes thread through the novel from start to end: Olawu’s ambitions, the institutions and individuals who stand in her way, and her resilience and resistance against them. A major contributor to Olawu’s success in finding herself and her place in the world is her family, both biological and found. The proverb, “Umntu ngumtu ngabantu” (A person is a person because of other people) is an important element of the novel; Olawu does not accomplish what she does on her own, but through the kindness, love, and sacrifice of others.

Olawu‘s success as a novel is also due to Leigh’s incisive and evocative prose, and well-crafted characters. Leigh’s prose reminds me of Things Fall Apart; the writing is succinct and sharp, absent of flowery and unnecessary description. Leigh focuses on the characters, letting the reader organically create an image. The characters are distinctive and recognizable; their flaws — even Olawu’s — mirror our own, making the reader sympathize with all of them, even when they are at odds with one another.

The result is a highly character-driven, powerful coming of age story.

Leigh’s depth of research must also be commended. While the novel does not draw from specific East African pre-colonial history, it is evident Leigh has researched the region’s precolonial political systems, structures, and gender history. I especially appreciated the inclusion of glossary terms and pronunciations at the beginning of the book.

This is a fantastic read for all young people, but especially young women of color who need to see themselves represented decolonizing/post colonial literature like this.

I encountered Olawu through a Facebook group I’m in, where I serve as a reviewer of (mostly) independently published books. Organized by the admins of this group, the review event takes place bimonthly, and involves reviewers submitting a short biography to the organizer. Authors who are looking for reviews of their work reply to the organizer, selecting the reviewer of their choice. Reviewers then select which authors and books they’d agree to review based on the descriptions of the books.

If you would like to read Olawu yourself, you can find it here on Amazon. It is 318 pages and the paperback is currently priced at $14.99 and the Kindle ebook at $8.99.

The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise by Pico Iyer

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The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise
by Pico Iyer

Memoir. History. Travelogue. In this book, Iyer seeks out ways in which paradise exists on earth and in the human imagination. The result is a global journey, one which peels back the multiple images and meanings the word “paradise” evokes.

Divided into three parts, The Half Known Life delves headfirst into the various ways humanity has dreamed of paradise, understood and interpreted it. Part one takes on the Islamic, Iranian version of paradise and its manifestation on earth, the notion of a “promised land” in whatever subjective form that may be. Part two has a spiritual, religious slant; faiths offer the incentive of a paradise, whether earthly or otherworldly. Iyer scatters his ink wide from Damascus to Ethiopia to the Shangri-La of the Himalayas. The Half Known Life explores Judeo-Christian views, Buddhist perspectives, indigenous ideas of what heaven may be or could be or is. Part three takes the conversation to the dark side: the afterlife, the question of time and if paradise is a time or a place.

Musings. Memories. Philosophies. The Half Known Life is a collection of ideas, all aimed toward this notion of paradise, whether geographical or psychological or paranormal. This is a work of philosophical significance and a view into how our world views the places of our desires (a paradise on earth) and our sense of what comes after life ends and where we go (heaven, for lack of a better word).

The Unforgiven Dead: A Novel by Fulton Ross

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The Unforgiven Dead: A Novel by Fulton Ross

This Tartan Horror/Mystery had me creeped out in the middle of the night! And yet, I couldn’t put it down, spine shivers be damned!

The novel revolves around a murder of a young girl and the mystery of her gruesome death, as seen through the eyes of the local constable who is investigating it, Angus. But this policeman is extraordinarily gifted with paranormal (in)sight, a legacy of his own haunted past. What results is a deeply engrossing whodunit woven through with Gaelic history and culture. For readers who enjoy hints of the demonic, pagan, and ancient evils, The Unforgiven Dead will have you prancing a ritual dance. For readers who love a twisted murder mystery, one in which the murderer is hidden in plain sight alá Agatha Christie, The Unforgiven Dead will absolutely make you squeal once the culprit is exposed.

But the story alone is not the novel’s only draw. The characters of this novel are deftly crafted, their dialogue mimics life, their motivations are raw and human and utterly flawed. For readers of literary fiction, the trials of Angus, Nadia, Gills, and Ashleigh will rent your heart. Their lives mimic reality and their hurts are ones we are likely to relate to, if we don’t know them well already.

The Unforgiven Dead leaves me pining for a moody, grey Scotland more than I could have imagined.

The Vales: A Story of Love, Evil, and Redemption by George Graziani

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The Vales: A Story of Love, Evil, and Redemption
by George Graziani
I encountered The Vales through a Facebook group I'm in, where I serve as a reviewer of (mostly) independently published books. Organized by the admins of this group, the review event takes place bimonthly, and involves reviewers submitting a short biography to the organizer. Authors who are looking for reviews of their work reply to the organizer, selecting the reviewer of their choice. Reviewers then select which authors and books they'd agree to review based on the descriptions of the books.

My review: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ for prose and writing, ⭐️⭐️⭐️ for storytelling. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ for character development. An overall rating of ⭐️⭐️⭐️.75

The Vales is an intensely character-driven novel revolving around two, intertwined stories, and taking place over the course of a long weekend. The first centers on a family gathering at the home of the grandparents, while the other is a criminal misadventure. Both stories run parallel — until they collide, drawing the innocent family into chaos. Both tales unfold through first person accounts of the events in real time, each chapter devoted to the perspective of one of the characters.

The Vales comprise of Grace and Joseph, the matriarch and patriarch of the family. It is their home where the weekend gathering takes place. Their children, Eva and Bobby, are middle-aged adults with families of their own. Eva has her husband, Adam and a wild teenage daughter, Ziggy. Bobby has his wife, Renata, and two boys, Danny and Roland, who are a little younger than their cousin.

This is a novel seeking to excavate the layers of motivation — emotional, cultural, and pragmatic — behind an individual’s actions. Each narrator exposes their most vulnerable selves in these pages, with a deeply intimate result. The reader is privy to each narrator’s desires, secrets, and fears — even those they are unwilling to acknowledge themselves. The flawed natures of the characters are sure to evoke a sense of empathy in the reader; there’s someone we recognize in each of them, our own mothers, aunts, uncles, friends.

The prose throughout the novel therefore changes voice frequently; the pitch and tone of Danny’s chapters reflect the concerns of a boy on the edge of puberty, while Bobby’s are the stuff of adult-sized angst. The prose is very well-crafted, but this reader found this recurrent shift in voice created a superfluousness that did not pay an eventual reward. This was also due, in part, to the content of each narrator’s chapter.

Because of the story unfolds through the eyes of several narrators and each one provides an account of events in the present tense, there is a redundancy in the retelling of events which the reader already knew about. The telling and multiple retelling of the same events by different narrators did not progress the story. Instead this tendency caused the novel to sag in several parts. It was unfortunate that the different perspectives did not add conflict or dramatic effect to the events.

The intense interiority of each narration also produced other jarring effects. Perhaps the author submerged this reader too well, too deeply, with their intimate prose because the the shifts in narrators pulled this reader from the depths of a character’s mind too soon, leading to breaks in the mood of the moment. The other effect, also a consequence of the deep interior view into the character’s mind, was the character’s mental wandering into tangential domains; the result was the introduction of many supporting characters, too many for this reader to keep track of. Were they important enough to remember? This reader found that many of them were there to serve as foils to the characters themselves, and as such they did not add to the story significantly.

My verdict on The Vales is therefore mixed. On the one hand, it is very well-written and full of well-crafted characters. The character-driven aspect of the work is apparent and very much appreciated. On the other hand, the delivery of the story stagnated at several points and ultimately did not pay out on the promise made in the subtitle: Love, Evil, and Redemption. Of the three, love was most visible. Evil was present, though the events did not quite merit that extreme of a description. Redemption felt rushed at the end; the point at which the two stories slam into each other possessed a moment of conflict that was (to this reader) under-dramatized. The events bringing the Vales into contact with a sordid reality deserved greater attention, not in terms of a play-by-play of the events themselves, but in terms of their meaning to the characters involved.

I am nonetheless glad for the experience of reading it. If you would like to, you can find the novel for sale here. Currently, The Vales is available for purchase at the price of $29.99 for a hardback, $14.93 for a paperback, and $7.46 for the Kindle ebook version. To learn more about the author, you may click here.

The Nakano Thrift Shop: A Novel by Hiromi Kawakami

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The Nakano Thrift Shop: A Novel
by Hiromi Kawakami

I saw this book at the library and the cover was so cute, I just couldn’t resist checking it out. I know, I know, I shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but who doesn’t? Really? That said, the description also hooked me: I love thrift stores and I love Japanese fiction.

The Nakano Thrift Shop did not disappoint. The novel follows in that great Japanese literary tradition of deeply intimate writing. The story was simple, but poignant; it was recognizable and human in its simplicity, in its ordinariness. The events of the novel could have happened anywhere and to anyone, and that’s what makes it so relatable and so touching. Readers will find a part of themselves here in some way.

The novel revolves — unsurprisingly — around Nakano’s thrift store, a kind of junk store that sells amazing and banal things, and its employees. A young woman, a worker at the store, is the protagonist through whose eyes we view this small world. Her interactions with Nakano, a quiet young man who is her colleague, the shop owner’s sister, customers, and others within the orbit of the shop are the focus of the novel. This novel is about capturing a short moment in time, a time and world bracketed by the opening and closing of the store; it is a slice of their interconnected lives.

The events that take place are mundane: sales, returns, fixations on objects in the shop, the comings and goings of certain customers, falling in and out of love, the opening and closing of the store. Nothing “happens” but the slightest of events change the dynamics of the shop and its denizens, revealing a new perspective. The novel reveals how thin our veneers are, and how small actions can suddenly strip away our layers. The reader is treated to that peeling away, gets to witness characters in their most human and vulnerable form. That is the brilliance and appeal of this novel.

Puppet Flower: A Novel of 1867 Formosa by Yao-Chang Chen.

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Translated by Pao-fang Hsu, Ian Maxwell, and Tung-jung Chen.

Puppet Flower: A Novel of 1867 Formosa by Yao-Chang Chen.

A historian’s historical novel! Puppet Flower is a narrative novel based on real events, a watershed moment in Taiwanese (Formosan) history when the United States and Western colonizing powers begin to encroach on Taiwan in earnest. The novel begins with an unfortunate event, wherein an American ship encounter one of Formosa’s indigenous tribes after surviving a storm at sea. The surviving crew — including a woman — are murdered by the Formosans, triggering a series of investigations and the arrival of more Western ships and military.

What makes Chen’s novel special in this genre of historical fiction is that Western perspectives are well-balanced with indigenous ones. It is rare to encounter fiction focused on Taiwan’s indigenous community, historical or otherwise; in highlighting their unique experience here Chen offers readers and the world at large a rare and unique literary opportunity. The result is a fantastic novel that — in my opinion — would do well in the classroom for a number of reasons aside from its historical focus:

  • The story arc is peppered with references and information about Formosan culture, providing a context for the historical events themselves. Unlike many historical novels, which rarely explain the cultural references they point to, Chen writes for the non-expert.
  • Puppet Flower offers multiple perspectives rather than focusing on a single protagonist. In this case, the novel allows us to see the event from an indigenous and Western point of view.
  • The prose is straightforward and not superciliously literary, making this an ideal undergraduate book; it does not require a great deal of knowledge about literary tropes, metaphors, and other devices typically used in novels. This is, truly, a history novel.

Overall, a novel of great historical value, not only in terms of its content, but in its production. This is decolonization at work, a piece of scholarship that highlights the indigenous perspective, a view of the imperial encounter from those who were colonized.

Burn The Negative: A Novel by Josh Winning

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Burn The Negative: A Novel by Josh Winning

It’s such a cliché to say “I couldn’t put it down!” but with Burn The Negative it was so true! Thrillers set in contemporary digs are rarely my chosen genre, but every once in awhile a little thrill appeals to me and relieves me from the setting and character-driven interiority of historical or literary fiction. Burn The Negative had everything I wanted in a thriller: compelling characters with flawed, awful motives; a fast-paced plot that left me thinking “Oh no, what the WHAT?” as things go from horrendous to abysmal; mysterious hints that led me to announce “Aha!” far too early; and, the cherry on top: a twisted ending.

The novel opens with a fabulous line, immediately a portent of fuckery on a grand scale. A young women is headed somewhere she’d rather not be. It’s for work, but it isn’t really, and she’s having a bit of a nervous breakdown over it. The woman is the novel’s protagonist, Laura, who is a former child actor, now tasked with rehashing her Hollywood trauma as a journalist writing an article about the remake of the horror film that killed her career and ended her normal psychological development as a teenager. This is a novel that revolves around the drama of Hollywood on multiple levels, leaving the reader feeling very much like they are watching a Netflix Original horror film unfold in text.

As the remake of the film progresses, things go unbelievably wrong. But is this marketing? Is this the curse of the original horror film? Is it Laura herself? Both the remake and Laura’s memories of her Hollywood nightmare disintegrate into a surreal soup, leaving the reader wondering if there is something paranormal at foot or not.

The story alone is not the only draw of the novel. Winning’s prose is witty and the book includes fun elements — flashbacks, articles, ephemera, movie lore — which flesh out the story arc, provide context, and make the novel feel deliciously kitschy. This book is fun.

Fans of horror films, horror film lore, haunted media, and fast-paced mysteries can fully expect to enjoy Burn The Negative.

Welcome Me To The Kingdom: Stories by Mai Nardone

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Welcome Me To The Kingdom: Stories by Mai Nardone

It is so rare to find novels and creative fiction that is not only set in Southeast Asia, but written by Southeast Asian authors (rare, not impossible!) that when I saw this coming out in 2023 I JUMPED on it! And I am so glad I did. This is a book that makes my heart sing!

Nardone’s Welcome Me to the Kingdom is a novel woven in stories, revolving around the lives of Thais who live in Thailand or beyond in the diaspora, transnational and transcultural Thais. This is a book about people, individuals as they navigate the multiethnic and multicultural world of Thailand, and what it means to be Thai for them. The characters, as diverse as they are in terms of ethnicity, class, and gender, are connected together in this novel; they and their lives serve as a microcosmic diorama of Thai realities where muslims of the south grapple with discrimination, poverty stricken girls from the village migrate to the city, mixed race Thai/White kids straddle two worlds and belong not quite fully into either one.

The stories span across several decades and generations, allowing the reader a view, not only into modern Thainess, but also how the concept has changed over time and the ways in which being Thai is differently defined for individuals of different religions, classes, genders, etc. Language is a significant element in these stories, not surprisingly since Thailand (like so many other parts of Southeast Asia) has and remains affected by colonialism and its invasive culture (though it was never politically colonized). Welcome Me to the Kingdom is about the rubbing together of cultures, the tension and chafing as multiple perspectives collide. This is a historical novel offering readers a textured, multi-faceted sense of contemporary Thailand, a place in which tradition and modernity coexist, sometimes contentiously, sometimes not.

My favorite characters were Nam and Lara, their story, interwoven with Pea’s and Rick’s, was my favorite, though I probably identified most with Ping. I think readers will find a little bit of themselves in these pages, whether they are Thai or not, as the emotion driving these stories is universal. Nardome’s stories are about desire, ambition, longing, and fear — that inevitable friction between parents and children, within families, the old(er) and new(er) attempting to find common ground.

For readers who enjoy anthropology, history, and postcolonial literature, Welcome Me to the Kingdom will be an especially enjoyable read.