black fiction – Dr JoAnn LoSavio

You Make It Feel Like Christmas: A Novel by Toni Shiloh

April 17, 2024 JLLeave a comment

I’m not a reader of romances. It’s not that I completely eschew a romantic twist in the tale; it’s fine if it’s interconnected to the tale, forwards the motives of the characters, adds some tension to he dialogue. But generally, I don’t seek out romance novels, the kind in which love or lust are the primary objectives of the story.

So I took a chance on You Make It Feel Like Christmas. It’s — as the title makes obvious — a Christmas romance, to boot. These things usually follow a formula (as I understand it), so I expected something similar to what I’ve watched on Netflix around Christmastime; y’know, the Reese Witherspoon-look alike kind of rom-com movies that are all about feeling good after feeling bad about family, love, marriage, some kind of expectation or the failure to deliver it. You know the type.

I was not disappointed. Readers of contemporary holiday romance will likely find You Make It Feel Like Christmas a perfect reflection of the genre. They will walk away from reading it with a sense of wholesomeness, like things are the way they should be. It’s a feel-good read that delivers.

Starr Lewis and family friend, Waylon Emmerson are the fated lovers, but there is also Starr’s whole immediate family, a cast of characters who are equal parts infuriating and endearing. This is family goodness, right here.

Because of the wholesomeness of this romance, readers should not expect high octane, reality-tv-show drama (though there are moments when a particular sister might drive the reader to throw something); but, there is tension and the romance does not flow in a smooth linear fashion from point A to point B. Moreover, there are not only tensions between the lovers, but also within the Lewis family as its members navigate the stress of the holiday and other momentous events.

What is smooth and linear is Shiloh’s prose. The story is delivered in a straightforward manner, though with finesse and her own style, making the novel a pleasant read. It’s perfect for de-stressing during the holiday season, as the reader might need to navigate their own family dramas.

The Nickel Boys: A Novel by Colson Whitehead

December 16, 2023December 15, 2023 JLLeave a comment

This novel knocked the breath out of me. It’s a punchy, unabashed novel that does not hold back for the delicate senses of the reader. And that’s really its purpose: to strike, to aggressively announce blackness and the terrible history of being black in America.

The Nickel Boys are children and teens who have been sentenced to a juvenile detention center of the same name, a place that announces its purpose is rehabilitation and calls itself a school in name only. This is where the state of Florida shuts away its poor, young white and black boys. The novel follows a young man who, after seventeen years of successfully avoiding the racism roaming the streets in the form of cops, finds himself arrested and carted off to Nickel for his sentence. Here, he and reader have their eyes opened to the brutalities of being a black boy in a white man’s world.

Like Whitehead’s other novels, The Nickel Boys is written with an urban lyricism unique to him. The way Whitehead’s prose and story weaves in on itself, producing by the novel’s end, a symmetrical structure is deeply satisfying and alluring to this reader. Throughout the novel there are little hints at its ending, as if its ending was never — should never — be a surprise (though it is, and purposefully so). Whitehead is a master at unravelling just enough thread to keep the reader dangling, tying off all the knots at the end to zip it all up.

The Unsettled: A Novel by Ayana Mathis

December 9, 2023 JLLeave a comment

This novel gut-punched me in ways that only good novels can. I could feel tears sting along those nerves behind my eyes. Sometimes I felt my skin get sweat-clammy. The Unsettled unsettles, just like Mathis wants it to.

Right from the start, The Unsettled knocks you down and it doesn’t let up. Its breathless, relentless struggle, the way it forces the reader to keep grasping for relief mimics the feeling that its protagonists feel, trapped in a transient limbo of poverty and abuse and disappointment. This is a novel about what it is to be black and working class in urban America.

The novel revolves around a young boy and his mother, forced to live in temporary housing because of an abusive stepfather and husband, because of racist, classist inequities, because life has dealt them a harsh hand. The novel documents their life before and during their stay in this housing, the people they encounter there, at school, in their former and current neighborhoods. Interwoven between these grim chapters is the story of the mother’s past, her mother and a different world of an all-black enclave in the deep south. In this place too, there is the struggle for blackness to simply exist. The two stories are linked by several threads, the most salient of which is the structural oppression of blackness in America; both stories eventually merge into one, culminating in an explosive end.

Mathis writes with a machete, its edge as sharp as a scalpel. The prose in The Unsettled is blunt, straightforward, and will absolutely cut you down. But the pace of this beating does not exhaust; I was compelled to return to the book again and again until it was done with me (and not I done with it). Its characters were there with me, around me, so fleshy and tangible. I read mostly in bed, where I feel warm and safe, and there were more than a few times when I put down the book and nearly cried, wishing they did not have to live in such an unsafe, cold, grey place.