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Recent Reviews
Zora Neale Hurston, Ed. by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Genevieve West
Positive The Christian Science Monitor You Don\'t Know Us Negroes...oscillates effortlessly between folklore, Hurston’s reporting, and her essays ... Readers are treated to sweeping examples of Hurston’s keen wit and her criticism of respectability politics, sexism, and classism. Throughout the collection, she takes unfaltering aim at issues not just outside the Black community but within it as well ... not light reading. It deals with complicated and raw topics that may be too intense for young readers. The collection is meant to be absorbed piece by piece, slowly, over time. It has much to offer but readers must take the time to fully read and appreciate the material.
Farah Jasmine Griffin
Positive The Christian Science Monitor \"With so many references to various source material, Read Until You Understand may be unwieldy for those looking for a quick read. This book encourages readers to stop and research the references Griffin highlights ... Griffin’s effortlessly warm and engaging writing merges personal memoir with history in a way that emphasizes the oneness of the fabric of humanity. With deft fluidity, she combines archival material and memory to form a cohesive exploration into Black life. The best part is that Griffin accomplishes this task without the reader really noticing ... With both grace and mercy, Griffin’s Read Until You Understand is a thorough exercise in Black thought, Black anger, and Black joy. \
Zakiya Dalila Harris
Rave The Christian Science Monitor While The Other Black Girl may come off as another office drama novel, there is something much more sinister skulking beneath the surface ... Harris does an excellent job at unraveling intricate and complicated topics about Black life in predominantly white work spaces. Drawing from her own experiences working at the publishing house Alfred A. Knopf, Harris unflinchingly builds a workplace that feels unsettlingly familiar – both in its goal to secure \'diversity hires\' and its simultaneous refusal to change anything about its internal culture or its systemic inequities. It’s a conversation that is increasingly pertinent, as companies and organizations across the country attempt to address their racist and sexist practices in increasingly inauthentic ways after last year’s protests against police brutality ... While The Other Black Girl captures the frustration that so often stems from working in predominantly white offices, it also highlights another awful facet of that work culture ... The true horror of “The Other Black Girl” is that there is an undeniable truth in it. Black people must choose between tolerating an office culture that wants us to change, or working to change that office culture at the expense of job security and social rejection. And Black people must reckon with the fact that while there are many Nellas in the world, there are also many Hazels: those who are willing to do whatever it takes to ensure that there is no \'other Black person\' in the office. While many people dread being tokenized, there is a quiet horror to the idea that some people actually enjoy it. By the end of Harris’ novel, Black readers will be forced to ask this hard and singular question: Which one are you?
Kaitlyn Greenidge
Rave The Christian Science Monitor Greenidge crafts Libertie not into a perfect heroine but into a nuanced one ... Truth and fiction blend seamlessly ... Greenidge’s years-long research into Black history elevates the novel into what scholar Saidiya Hartman calls \'critical fabulation.\' It’s the practice of pulling from the often incomplete archives on pre-20th century Black life to weave together whole and vibrant stories. Seen alongside the real lives of Susan Smith McKinney Steward, a 19th century Black doctor and her daughter, Anna, Libertie’s story feels more like truth, like a life that perhaps was never documented for scholars to find decades later ... History buffs will love the various historical references that indirectly shape the landscape ... But Greenidge doesn’t rely solely on history to carry the plot of the book and instead imbues Libertie with the fire and will to make her own choices. She drives her own story forward and is an active character in the forces that shape her life ... While Greenidge tackles these unwieldy topics with ease in Libertie, she does not necessarily seek to answer how we eradicate these issues. We are, after all in 2021, still battling the same forces Libertie resists in the novel. Instead, Libertie asks us to reimagine what freedom, when it centers those most dispossessed of it, could look like. What would it mean for Libertie, a young Black woman, to build her own future? You’ll certainly want to read the book and find out.
Keisha Bush
Positive The Christian Science Monitor ... a heartbreaking story of loss, love, and family ... Bush also takes deft aim at religious hypocrisy ... Bush is an adept storyteller; she spins out the colorful world of Dakar, and captures the sights and sounds of Ibrahimah’s home village, Saloulou, as well as the streets of the more industrialized Ouakam. You can nearly smell the ocean and hear the sizzle of meat over an open flame ... While Bush is certainly a talented writer, there are certain parts of No Heaven for Good Boys that don’t quite fit together. The chapters—which switch between the points of view of Ibrahimah, Étienne, Maimouna, and even Ahmed—sometimes become disjointed. Bush does an excellent job of fleshing out Maimouna’s character, but Ibrahimah, despite being the focal point of the book, still reads as somewhat flat. Furthermore, there are many random American cultural references ... despite the physical and emotional abuse in the novel, there is an immense sense of beauty and love in it as well. Bush’s writing and compelling storytelling will envelope you, until you realize you’ve spent hours lost in the streets of Dakar with Ibrahimah and Étienne.
José Olivarez
Rave AFROPUNK You feel that familiar darkening at the horizon woven into Olivarez\'s work—he\'s able to masterfully encapsulate the snarling teeth of white supremacy, growing cancerous in a stunted society ... there is light, too ... Olivarez has a certain type of ingenuity when using metaphors. When he approaches well-worn topics like racism and xenophobia, he uses surprising parallels to talk about them ... Wolves and Wolverinze make appearances...apt metaphors for the anger that floods so many of us when living underneath the weight of racism ... What makes Citizen Illegal such a necessary read is the familiarity of it ... What we consider \'legal\' is only a system of laws built on upholding white supremacy.