RaveThe Washington PostIn a perfectly orchestrated symphony of specificity, nuance, Jim Crow history and memory, Perkins-Valdez brings the events and images of Montgomery 1973 whizzing back like an unscheduled train rushing past a platform. As always, the author has clearly spent a great deal of time researching to ensure depth and accuracy. Perkins-Valdez paints Montgomery in such rich strokes, you can feel history breathing down your neck ... Not every reader will recognize the careful detail, but those who do will feel rewarded to finally behold a book that centers their experience. And in a novel that is steeped in the stew and issues of womanhood, Perkins-Valdez manages to get even the male characters on point ... In exploring unexplored events involving Black American women, Perkins-Valdez gives us a fuller, richer view of our nation’s history while also reminding readers that Black girls’ bodies and futures have never been protected in the American experiment ... Take My Hand reminds us that truly extraordinary fiction is rarely written merely to entertain ... Perkins-Valdez has done a fine job of building a structure and scaffolding that will not only endure but also bear the weight of future writers yearning to bring the past to readers afresh.
Dawn Turner
RaveThe Washington Post... uses the trope of little Black girls inventing and reinventing themselves at certain points in history to help define the era and the country. Through the stories of three generations of women, Turner has given us a tutorial of urban decay, White privilege, poor city planning and the influence of fads and digital advances on Black urban teenagers ... Turner is a natural born storyteller and a sponge for knowledge, trivia, memories, gossip and urban folk lore (many Black women readers may be particularly shocked at the origins of a common anatomical nickname). She is a keen observer with a journalist’s curiosity and the wisdom to know that the panorama becomes clearer the narrower the focus ... With each exciting or mundane story from the girls’ upbringings, Turner makes the reader feel that he or she is the only observer in the world at that spot in Bronzeville ... Turner allows the reader to see the next page in that truly American story of migrating and reinvention, through the eyes and adventures of her and her childhood friends. Turner’s tone is true whether she’s describing the girls’ quotidian race to a special spot on a ledge above Bronzeville, in their mid-range building seemingly planted between the projects and a fancy, new apartment complex, or the heart-racing discovery of what her grandmother calls \'that nasty photograph\' – a polaroid of a naked Black woman young Dawn finds in the laundry room. She may have begun as an awkward nerd, stumbling through life, afraid to question any rules, but she has clearly grown into a powerful speaker of truth. As narrator of this volume, Turner has learned a thing or six about perspective and forgiveness, acceptance and humility ... At times, the lives and personalities of the adults threaten to eclipse the girls’ tale. Still, this is an exceptional work, a memoir told with honesty, grit and a sly wit that continually takes readers to unexpected places. It makes one hope that Turner might return to this memoir in 10 or 20 years for a second volume. I’m hooked on these women.
Bernice L. McFadden
RaveLos Angeles Review of Books\"The novel has a timeless quality; McFadden is a master of taking you to another time and place. In doing so, she raises questions surrounding the nature of memory, what we allow to thrive, and what we determine to execute. Praise Song for the Butterflies is a cautionary tale with a cruel twist ... McFadden brings the sweeping drama of her earlier works — The Book of Harlan, Glorious, Gathering of Waters — into this small book, and reminds me of the gentle fierceness of Edwidge Danticat’s writing. Despite the novel’s spare style and story line, there is fleeting joy and relief ... For me, the sparseness of Praise Song is one of its strengths; for some, it may be a weakness ... McFadden is too accomplished a storyteller to leave the reader with anything less; yet it is redemption hard-won and fragile as a butterfly’s wings.\
Tayari Jones
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of Books\"...as in every truly masterful story, the facts only tell part of the tale. Jones has dared to go deep. And we readers have to go with her. This is a novel crafted, rather than told. Carefully considered and examined ... The novel unfolds seamlessly and naturally for the unsuspecting reader, whose perspectives on life and marriage, responsibility and survival, the challenges that break us and the ones that make us strong, are about to be disturbed, if not subverted. It asks the \'Big Questions\' that loom in the middle of the night when our squabbles have grown into hardened grievances and life has given us a backhanded slap.\
Michael Thomas
MixedThe Washington PostThomas has just begun to plumb the intricacies of race, identity and place in America. And it is not a calm examination. Thomas imbues the story with an intense pace and urgency as he explores masculinity, humanity and where the narrator – a self-proclaimed ‘social experiment’ – fits in … The writing is uneven throughout, perhaps reflecting the narrator's uneasy grasp on his world, perhaps the book's need for a stricter editorial hand. Either way, it tends to leave the reader caring deeply about the narrator in one chapter and frustrated with him in the next.
