RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksLong Division could have been a Nebula nominee.Long Division could have been a Young Adult classic. Long Division could have been a statement on American race relations. Long Division attempts to be all of these things. And while there are shortcomings — 270 pages might not be enough room to give every plot point and character arc the space they deserve — they are easily overshadowed by the book’s ambition. The book could have been 27,000 pages instead of 270, and readers would not tire of the world Laymon creates for his characters ... In a lesser novel, the idea of time travel could have easily pushed Long Division out of the literary realm and into the realm of genre writing. But the fantastic elements are still character-driven elements ... Ultimately, it is not the characters, the language, or the popular culture references that make Long Division an African-American text; it is the ghosts that inhabit the book ... Laymon gives us a story that embodies the ellipsis, the idea of an understood but unspoken beginning and ending. Narratives very rarely end; they go through edits and revisions. Characters are added and erased. For a book that begins with a grammar and language competition, Long Division fittingly ends with a statement about language, and that statement is that language, like history, never stops moving forward.
