Swan Dive: The Making of a Rogue Ballerina by Georgina Pazcoguin

Summary from Goodreads: Award-winning New York City Ballet soloist Georgina Pazcoguin, aka the Rogue Ballerina, gives readers a backstage tour of the real world of elite ballet—the gritty, hilarious, sometimes shocking truth you don’t see from the orchestra circle.

Swan Dive pitches us into the fascinating, dizzying lives of the dancers in one of the most revered ballet companies in the world. Georgina Pazcoguin, the New York City Ballet’s first Asian American soloist, tells her unfiltered story of leaving small-town Pennsylvania for New York City and training as a professional athlete, miles away from her parents, before finishing high school.

Rocked by scandal in the wake of the #MeToo movement, NYCB sits at an inflection point, inching toward progress in a strictly traditional culture, and Pazcoguin doesn’t shy away from ballet’s dark side. She continues to be one of the few dancers openly speaking up against the sexual harassment, mental abuse, and racism that in the past went unrecognized or was tacitly accepted as par for the course—all of which she has painfully experienced firsthand.

But along with her desire for justice and a deep respect for her craft, Pazcoguin has an unapologetic sense of humor about the cutthroat, literally survival-of-the-fittest culture of ballet. She relishes telling us about the torture (but economic necessity) that is the holiday “Nutbuster” season and holds nothing back in relaying the face-plants, backstage fights, and raucous company bonding sessions. You’ll never see a ballerina, or a ballet, the same way again.

Swan Dive is a really good memoir about being a biracial Filipina ballet dancer at New York City Ballet and what she experienced in pursuit of the art form she loves. She describes microaggressions, macroaggressions, fat shaming, verbal and psychological abuse from the artistic director at NYCB (although he’s no longer there, Peter Martins casts a very long shadow by having casting control over ballets he created), and sexual harassment from colleagues (one of whom will get a glowing retirement performance this fall). Gina does not pull her punches in this book and at times it is hard to read her experience (a, because it’s painful, and b, it made me really mad). She’s a born storyteller, though, and I just flew through the book. In between the “memoir” chapters are short “Swan Dive” chapters – times when she took a big fall, and often is able to laugh about it later.

I do wish that she talked a bit more about the decision to start Final Bow for Yellowface. She does mention it in part of discussing the built-in Orientalism/Yellowface of the Nutcracker but I think some more information about her work with Phil Chan and how the organization works would have been good (they do have a book though: Final Bow for Yellowface). But that’s a very minor thing.

Swan Dive is out July 26!

Dear FTC: I read a digital galley of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss.

The Duke Who Didn’t by Courtney Milan (The Wedgeford Trials #1)

Miss Chloe Fong has plans for her life, lists for her days, and absolutely no time for nonsense. Three years ago, she told her childhood sweetheart that he could talk to her once he planned to be serious. He disappeared that very night.

Except now he’s back. Jeremy Wentworth, the Duke of Lansing, has returned to the tiny village he once visited with the hope of wooing Chloe. In his defense, it took him years of attempting to be serious to realize that the endeavor was incompatible with his personality.

All he has to do is convince Chloe to make room for a mischievous trickster in her life, then disclose that in all the years they’ve known each other, he’s failed to mention his real name, his title… and the minor fact that he owns her entire village.

Only one thing can go wrong: Everything. 

ALLLLLLERRRRRTTTTT!!! Courtney. Milan. Has. A. New. Full. Length. Novel. WHEEEEE!!!!!!!

Chloe Fong is a planner – her to-do lists have to-do lists (seriously – if bullet journaling had existed in Victorian times, Chloe would have had the most efficient bullet journal of ever). She has a lot to get finished today – most important, and possibly the one she procrastinated on the most, is to figure out a name for her father’s secret recipe special brown sauce so they can launch the new product during the Wedgeford Trials (the Trials are like a cross between Capture the Flag and LARPing, it sounds like a hoot). What Chloe does not need, is one Jeremy Wentworth popping up to tease her to distraction. Three years ago she told him to leave her alone until he could be serious – and he did exactly as she said.

Jeremy Wentworth fell in love with Chloe about five seconds after he met her around the age of 12. And now he’s back to try and convince her that he is serious. Serious about loving her, serious about wanting her in his life. There’s just one wrinkle – Jeremy is actually the Duke of Lansing. The same duke who owns the entirety of the village of Wedgeford, this wonderful place made up of people hailing from cultures across the British Empire. Jeremy first visited the village as a lark instead of going to visit his horrible cousin during school holidays. He told no one that he was the duke because he loved how he seemed to fit right into this rich, multicultural community that immediately assigned him a Trials team. Jeremy is also half Chinese and has experienced the racism and microaggressions from his family and the peerage – would Chloe, as a British Chinese woman, want to be his duchess?

The Duke Who Didn’t is a sweet, low-stakes-but-still-with-teeth Victorian historical romance. Chloe wants to make sure her Ba gets the recognition he deserves for his delicious Brown Sauce (think Worcester Sauce, but maybe with elements from Chinese cuisine) and Jeremy needs to convince Chloe that she’s his one, true love. What I really loved is that Jeremy doesn’t want to change Chloe – he loves her glasses and lists and determination and her love for her father and the village – he just wants to figure out how to both be the Duke of Lansing and take care of her. The reveal, when it comes out that Jeremy is really the duke the entire village makes fun of, was so delicious. Courtney packed this book with so many good things: pining, good food (ugh, the bao buns, do want), a duke in disguise, a small road trip, only one bed, and, at the very end, a bit of delicious revenge.

I love this little book. The Duke Who Didn’t is out today! (Brief content warning that Jeremy and a other characters discuss racism they have experienced from white British people, but it isn’t graphic or violent on the page.)

Dear FTC: I read a digital galley of this book from the author.

When No One Is Watching by Alyssa Cole

Rear Window meets Get Out in this gripping thriller from a critically acclaimed and New York Times Notable author, in which the gentrification of a Brooklyn neighborhood takes on a sinister new meaning…

Sydney Green is Brooklyn born and raised, but her beloved neighborhood seems to change every time she blinks. Condos are sprouting like weeds, FOR SALE signs are popping up overnight, and the neighbors she’s known all her life are disappearing. To hold onto her community’s past and present, Sydney channels her frustration into a walking tour and finds an unlikely and unwanted assistant in one of the new arrivals to the block—her neighbor Theo.

But Sydney and Theo’s deep dive into history quickly becomes a dizzying descent into paranoia and fear. Their neighbors may not have moved to the suburbs after all, and the push to revitalize the community may be more deadly than advertised.

When does coincidence become conspiracy? Where do people go when gentrification pushes them out? Can Sydney and Theo trust each other—or themselves—long enough to find out before they too disappear?

I love Alyssa Cole’s romances so I was really excited when When No One Was Watching was announced as a thriller. Oooh, bring it.

And it is a really compelling book. A Rear Window meets Get Out meets Brooklyn gentrification. Sometimes the most terrifying plot is the one that seems like it could happen for real. Because there was a point in this book that I almost had to put it in the freezer so I could sleep. I really liked Sydney as a conflicted woman, with all sorts of real-world problems, as the main character of this story. She plays into the psychological thriller aspects of the novel so well – she’s forthright, and speaks her mind, and clearly marks when weird stuff is happening, but you know, she’s been under stress and has had a glass of wine or two so maybe she didn’t see what she thought she saw. Theo I felt could used a bit more character development, but I liked how he was willing to follow Sydney’s lead and learn how to use his privilege for good. The ending is kind of abrupt, in my opinion. I think I’ve made that observation about her romance novels before – that we get the plot resolution then, bloop, done and I would have liked maybe another chapter. But it’s a great wild ride.

Now, be aware that Alyssa does not pull her punches in this book. The horrible microaggressions and macroaggressions and in-your-face racism experienced by Black Americans is on the page here. Theo’s shitty ex-whatever-girlfriend is a Karen who threatens to call the cops on Sydney when Sydney notes the GF cut in line at the corner bodega. The new neighbors are constantly complaining that the “previous” owners clearly did not care for their houses when it’s obvious that is a lie. The community garden is ripped up by a white owner because the lot can be put to “better use” as a bougie apartment building or whatever. It becomes apparently that the Black residents of the neighborhood are being experimented on, in a horrifying repeat of history. The police are deployed to break up a “riot” when doesn’t even exist. The book is very prescient. (And I love that the title of the book is in present tense, not past tense.)

When No One Is Watching was published September 1. (And FYI: this is a thriller first, with a secondary plot with romance elements, so you might find this book in romance sections but that is not the point of the book.)

Dear FTC: I read a paper galley of this book that I received from the publisher.

Like Lovers Do by Tracy Livesay (Girls Trip #2)

Summary from Goodreads: Tracey Livesay continues her fun-filled Girls Trip series with this romance that will tug at your heartstrings.

Sometimes faking it can lead to the real thing…

Driven and focused, Dr. Nicole Allen is an accomplished surgeon. With a tough past, Nic’s gone above and beyond everyone’s expectations. But when she disciplines an intern—a powerful donor’s son—a prestigious fellowship she’s awaiting is placed in jeopardy. 

Coming from a successful family who runs a medical business empire, Benjamin Reed Van Mont is the black sheep, having chosen to start his own business instead. Though he’s not ready to settle down, he knows when the time comes it definitely won’t be with a workaholic doctor like his friend Nic—even if she’s had him re-examining his edict…more than once. 

When Ben’s status-climbing ex-girlfriend finds her way back into his orbit, Nic proposes a swap of services. She’ll spend the week with Ben on Martha’s Vineyard, pretending to be his girlfriend—but only if he’ll have his family intervene on her behalf so she won’t lose her fellowship. How hard can the charade be? 

But as they’re about to discover, they’ve sorely underestimated their true feelings for each other…

For my 140th read of 2020 (which completes my Goodreads reading goal in August, woo!) I present: mind-blowing hammock sex.

That’s it. That’s the review.

Jk. But the first time Nic and Ben have sexytimes they do it in a goddamn hammock and this is the “can you have sex while on horseback” question of 2020 contemporary romance. It’s amazing. Tracy Livesay is a queen.

Ok, for realz, Nic is a rockstar chief resident in orthopedic surgery headed to a prestigious sports medicine fellowship and Ben has been her landlord and best friend for three years. Nic is career-driven and avoids long-term relationships, preferring short hook-ups, and Ben is balls-deep in love with Nic but doesn’t want a career-driven partner because his parents were awful about putting him second to their careers. Near the end of Nic’s residency, she reprimands a new resident (intern?) – rightly – for blowing off a Black man with health problems and a septic joint to go watch a [sexy] spinal-fusion surgery. However, Racist Bro Surgeon goes whining off to his daddy, who is a major donor to the hospital, and Daddy threatens not only the end of Nic’s residency but also her fellowship placement. Nic doesn’t have a lot of ammunition at her disposal to fight back – she’s a woman, she comes from a less-advantaged background, she doesn’t have a prestigious family name, and she’s Black. She’s a tiny, tiny minority in a very dude-heavy, dick-swinging surgical specialty.

She does, however, have an ace up her sleeve. Ben’s family the Van Monts have generational clout in medicine from generations of doctors. When Nic tells Ben what happened, he offers to ask his parents to put in a good word for her. It’s what friends do, after all, despite the fact that he a) refused to go into the medical profession and b) walked away from working for the family foundation to start his own financial advising firm. When Nic hears that Ben’s ex Tinsley has invited herself to a friend vacation with plans to get Ben back in her clutches – which Ben definitely does not want – Nic offers to accompany Ben as his girlfriend. [Note: I want to make clear – as Ben does in the book – that this is not a quid pro quo situation and that Nic is not obligated to fake date Ben so he’ll call his mom for her.] But while they’re on Martha’s Vineyard, fake dating leads to realistic kissing to maybe something so much more.

I love it.

Nic is amazing and smart and strong – and a much more communicative orthopedic surgeon than I’ve ever encountered because we’re working with some of them on a couple of projects and they’re all allergic to checking their email – and Ben is such a cinnamon roll. The trope at play might be Friends to Lovers but there’s really no thunderblot “wow, Friendo is hot now!” moment. It’s this slow realization that the love between Ben and Nic has existed quietly for some time and they have to take the risk that being intimate and opening up is worth it.

Around the developing romance are two really good examinations about family and relationships. First, through the elitist and racist actions of Tinsley toward Nic, Ben starts to examine his own blind-spots and unintentional microaggressions about race. It leads to him developing a better relationship with Nic and also with a new client at his firm (I kinda hope, given the way Livesay wrote a few scenes with this character, that he’s being set up for a future book because we aren’t given many details about him and I’d really like to know more). Second, both Ben and Nic have built their lives and careers in reaction to perceived choices made by each of their parents. So they, separately, have to clear up some misconceptions with the older generation before they realize they can make a life together.

Did I mention that I love it?

Content warning: Ben’s obnoxious ex-fiance Tinsley is the Spoiled Racist Barbie among the cast of characters in Martha’s Vinyard but you definitely don’t sympathize with her and wish the rest of the characters would just murder her and put her body in the Sound. Also Spoiled Racist Bro Surgeon, but he’s on the page less. [Spoiler: the racists get their comeuppance.]

Like Lovers Do is out now! Even though it’s a book 2, you can definitely read it out of order, because I have book 1 but haven’t read it yet (SORRYYYY) but definitely need to go read it now! And look at that pretty cover.

Dear FTC: I read a digital copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss.

Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi

“Riot Baby bursts at the seams of story with so much fire, passion and power that in the end it turns what we call a narrative into something different altogether.”—Marlon James

Rooted in foundational loss and the hope that can live in anger, Riot Baby is both a global dystopian narrative an intimate family story with quietly devastating things to say about love, fury, and the black American experience.

Ella and Kev are brother and sister, both gifted with extraordinary power. Their childhoods are defined and destroyed by structural racism and brutality. Their futures might alter the world. When Kev is incarcerated for the crime of being a young black man in America, Ella—through visits both mundane and supernatural—tries to show him the way to a revolution that could burn it all down.

In his acknowledgements to Riot Baby, Tochi Onyebuchi thanks N.K. Jemisin for showing him how to write “the type of angry that still leaves room for love” in her Broken Earth trilogy.

And I think there might be no better way to describe the feeling of what happens in Riot Baby. The book opens during the Watts uprising after the cops who beat Rodney King were acquitted. Kev is born as the city burns. His older sister Ella has a gift, her Thing – she can see a person’s future, whether they grow to be an adult or become a statistic before middle school. Their mother moves them across the country to Harlem, where Kev is supposed to stay in school and out of trouble and Ella’s Thing grows in power at a frightening speed. She can now manipulate the physical world, cause destruction, lash out, but also try to fix what is broken.

Kev is arrested for armed robbery as a juvenile and spends a number of years at Rikers before being paroled into a near-future carceral state. Watts is now a planned parole community, everything controlled by implanted microchip. It’s an eerie dystopia lurking beneath the veneer of a utopia. And it seems that, over time, Kev also has developed a version of Ella’s Thing. The culmination of this book is a walk through Watts, through the hospital while Kev is being born, seeing the anger, the fear and the hope, and seeing what the two siblings decide what to do with this power they have been given.

This is an incredible and timely book. Published in January, Onyebuchi could not have known what would happen six months later. The demonstrations. The long-awaited destruction of statues commemorating colonizers, slave owners, Confederates. But the effects of systemic racism that results in the deaths of so many Black men at the hands of the police or incarceration as a new form of enslavement or the violent profiling of young Black men? That is ongoing and Onyebuchi uses it to fuel this book. One of the best books I’ve read this year.

Dear FTC: I bought my copy of this book #blackoutbestsellerlist

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong

Summary from Goodreads:
A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged exploration of the psychological condition of being Asian American, by an award-winning poet and essayist

Asian Americans inhabit a purgatorial status: neither white enough nor black enough, unmentioned in most conversations about racial identity. In the popular imagination, Asian Americans are all high-achieving professionals. But in reality, this is the most economically divided group in the country, a tenuous alliance of people with roots from South Asia to East Asia to the Pacific Islands, from tech millionaires to service industry laborers. How do we speak honestly about the Asian American condition—if such a thing exists?

Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively confronts this thorny subject, blending memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose the truth of racialized consciousness in America. Binding these essays together is Hong’s theory of “minor feelings.” As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these “minor feelings” occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you’re told about your own racial identity.

With sly humor and a poet’s searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and artmaking, and to family and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche—and of a writer’s search to both uncover and speak the truth.

I had Minor Feelings on my list of 2020 to-reads but when I saw Alexander Chee raving about it I bumped it up my reading queue. He’d never steer anyone wrong.

Hong’s book is a thought-provoking and provocative collection of essays concentrating on the lived experience of being Asian-American in America. Hong is a Korean-American poet, so much of her life experience centers around being a child of successful Korean immigrants in a majority-white neighborhood and education system (Hong attended Oberlin for her undergrad). Those experiences are her jumping off point to examine microaggressions, language, the pressures of being the “good” immigrants, expectations of gratitude, and a beautiful, haunting essay that walks the line of biography and true crime about artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, an author and artist who was murdered in the early 1980s.

A must-read for 2020.

 

Dear FTC: I read a digital galley of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss.

Real Life by Brandon Taylor

Summary from Goodreads:
Named one of the most anticipated books of the year by Entertainment Weekly, Harper’s Bazaar, BuzzFeed, and more.

A novel of startling intimacy, violence, and mercy among friends in a Midwestern university town, from an electric new voice.

Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends—some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community.

Real Life is a novel of profound and lacerating power, a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost.

About four or five (six? what is time?) years ago, someone RT’d a reaction gif of Pride and Prejudice (from the miniseries) into my Twitter feed. It was clever and spot on, from a guy named Brandon who was a biochem grad student. He had a whole string of gifs from a live-Tweet of the miniseries so I hit the follow button. I have never regretted it as Brandon shared more and more of his writing, beautiful short stories and personal essays, and his quietly sarcastic humor with us on Twitter and in various literary publications. After he moved to my town for the MFA program in writing, our paths crossed often on campus and at literary events. And I’m absolutely floored by Brandon’s debut novel Real Life. (I’m not surprised, since he’s so damn talented and has a heck of a work ethic, but the book is still a stunner.)

Real Life is a campus novel about a character who is always on the periphery of campus novels – a gay, black, and broke young man named Wallace in a prestigious biochemistry program at a very (very) white Midwestern university. This is not funny like Lucky Jim or navel-gaze-y like The Marriage Plot or Stoner. This is about one weekend in Wallace’s career in graduate school. Three days. One choice (accepting an invitation to hang at the lake with friends after his summer project goes wrong and he just doesn’t have the spoons to restart it that evening) that is the first domino in a chain of many to fall and lead him to the ultimate decision: should he stay in his graduate program and endure all manners of microaggressions and macroaggressions and continue to work doggedly toward his PhD or should he leave and take a chance on the unknown? Underlying all of Wallace’s actions is the knowledge that his estranged father died several weeks ago; no matter how much Wallace might try to keep the past buried safely in the past it bubbles up to confront him.

Wallace’s story is lovely, quiet, and so very, very real (Brandon always says he writes domestic realism and he isn’t wrong). Wallace is the kind of character who feels conditioned to keep an even keel and keep himself to himself, no matter how angry or happy or sad he might feel on the inside, because if he does drop the facade and express emotion he’s immediately smacked down for it. He’s picked on for his “deficiencies” – an absolutely maddening term and one I’ve heard used by faculty in the past to describe students from less-privileged (i.e. often code for “black”) backgrounds – and snidely dismissed by his adviser. His keep-your-head-down-and-work-hard ethic is thrown back at him as arrogant. Even though these events might seem like high drama, Brandon’s prose has such a calm beauty in his description. Even a description of breeding and plating nematodes has such beauty that we are hit with dismay when it’s revealed the plates are colonized by fungi, ruining the project. But it all feels so intimate, so quiet, particularly an extraordinary stream-of-consciousness chapter where Wallace narrates his childhood history to a lover (hook-up? lover? Booty-call isn’t right, either). Such a beautiful character study.

*Edit to add: at Brandon’s reading at Prairie Lights on Wednesday, he mentioned that some white reviewers see this novel as “raw” (or various similar descriptors) which…definitely not Wallace. I might concede rawness when it comes to showing the racist and homophobic micro and macroaggressions from his friends and colleagues, including one really awful scene where a fellow graduate student (and I absolutely despise this character) uses the n- and f- words before accusing him of misogyny. Brandon isn’t interested in coating their treatment of Wallace in politeness, to make white people feel better. There’s no window-dressing or walking-back to soften these characters. It feels raw because the “nice” and “who mean well” has been removed from the Nice White People Who Mean Well. They’re presented in all their ickiness.

I’m a bit worried I am not doing Real Life justice in my review. Sometimes, you finish a book and just sit in wonder. This book speaks to me on many levels and on other levels I know I have missed nuances. As a nice, white, straight, middle-aged lady, there are corners and layers in Wallace’s story that I will never uncover, no matter how hard I try because I just don’t have the experience or background to see them. To make up for this, allow me to link to three incredible reviews of Real Life, all by men who are both black and queer: Michael Arceneaux in Time, Jeremy O. Harris in The New York Times, and MJ Franklin also in the Times.

Real Life is an early contender for one of my best books of 2020 (and 2020 publishing is bananas, y’all). Please, please buy it, read it, recommend it for your library to purchase. Meanwhile, I’ll be waiting on pins and needles for Brandon’s short story collection, Filthy Animals. Real Life is available everywhere in the US today!

Dear FTC: I read a digital galley of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss and will be buying a copy at Brandon’s reading tomorrow. Also, he’s a friend, so take that as you will.

 

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

Summary from Goodreads:
In this bravura follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning #1 New York Times bestseller The Underground Railroad , Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.

As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: He is “as good as anyone.” Abandoned by his parents, but kept on the straight and narrow by his grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But for a black boy in the Jim Crow South in the early 1960s, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy the future. Elwood is sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called The Nickel Academy, whose mission statement says it provides “physical, intellectual and moral training” so the delinquent boys in their charge can become “honorable and honest men.”

In reality, The Nickel Academy is a grotesque chamber of horrors, where the sadistic staff beats and sexually abuses the students, corrupt officials and locals steal food and supplies, and any boy who resists is likely to disappear “out back.” Stunned to find himself in such a vicious environment, Elwood tries to hold on to Dr. King’s ringing assertion “Throw us in jail and we will still love you.” His friend Turner thinks Elwood is worse than naive, that the world is crooked and the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble.

The tension between Elwood’s ideals and Turner’s skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades. Formed in the crucible of the evils Jim Crow wrought, the boys’ fates will be determined by what they endured at The Nickel Academy.

Based on the real story of a reform school in Florida that operated for one hundred and eleven years and warped the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers.

I was so excited when The Nickel Boys was announced because The Underground Railroad was one of the best books I read in 2016. So much is packed into this little book. Now, it didn’t wreck me like The Underground Railroad – I was a sobbing mess by the end of that book. The Nickel Boys was more quietly devastating. Whitehead didn’t pull his punches but instead slipped them around from behind. The violence doesn’t hit you in the face, it come from the side, stabs you in the back. I also thought a lot about Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us, currently streaming on Netflix, of all the years and opportunities schools and jails like the Nickel Academy steal from young black men.

Read for the Barnes and Noble Book Club – the best book they’ve picked for the program by far.

Dear FTC: I read an advance galley sent to my store for the book club discussion leader (me).