Starred review from February 27, 2023
White follows a Brooklyn family across three generations in his poignant and poetic debut. Audrey, the grandmother, moves from North Carolina to Brooklyn, where she lives in the same apartment for 40 years before her rent is jacked up and she’s evicted in the late 2000s, a year after the death of her daughter, Key, from cancer. Key’s 14-year-old son, Colly, searches for ways to move on with a fractured family after his mother’s death. Colly grieves not only his mother but also his neighborhood of East New York as it’s broken apart by gentrification. In flashbacks set in the late 1980s, Key discovers an ability to see the dead, including people who were taken from Africa and enslaved in the American South. Now, Key becomes a transient spirit, watching over Colly as he comes of age in a lonely apartment, finding hope with an internship at MoMA and despair after seeing another kid get shot in his neighborhood. Each character is acutely aware of the weight of their forebears, which White uses to effectively tell a story that is both intimate and sweeping: “The problem was that the ghosts stayed with me. Each one left a shadow under my eye,” Key laments. White works wonders with this inspired story of grief and the struggle for hope. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.
March 15, 2023
A hyperkinetic, sometimes-moving debut novel about three generations of a Black family in New York City, spanning the last four decades. Key is a doula in 1980s Brooklyn, and, like her mother, Audrey, she has the ability to communicate with those who've departed this realm. For these women, the barrier between the living and the dead is not an unbridgeable gulf but a membrane that can be permeated. Their gift is treated less as supernatural (with that term's implication of weirdness and the occult) than as hypernatural; it's an exquisite sensitivity born of rapport, one that's familiar rather than strange. Key's untimely death leaves her mother in limbo, with the looming threat of losing the public-housing apartment they've shared. And it leaves her loving son, Colly, bereft, but before long he'll come into the family inheritance--and thus get to engage his mother's voice, over the rest of the novel, in the ways he'll need to as he grows up, leaves New York for college and a bit of time after, and then is summoned back by the ties that bind him not only to family, but to the larger community of Black, working-class East New York. The book covers a lot of ground, and it can seem at times diffuse or indulgent, but for the most part its wide-ranging, multivocal, quick-shifting style--which incorporates frequent allusions to literature and visual art, brand names and the neighborhood prestige attached to them, and a mixtape element--serves admirably to emphasize the book's ambition, which is to capture and to celebrate not just these characters, this family, but the community and the city they emerge from, serve, and love. An intelligent, gritty, discursive group portrait of working-class New York from the 1980s to now.
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