Reviews by hollyd19 | The StoryGraph

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hollyd19

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The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

James McBride

4.5

adventurous emotional funny hopeful mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

Reading McBride's acclaimed new novel felt a bit like sitting fireside with a bunch of neighborhood elders who are recounting long-ago stories with dramatic flair and blurry edges between truth and folklore.

Set in the Chicken Hill neighborhood of Pottstown, Pennsylvania in the 1920s, the story centers on a predominantly Black community with a good contingent of Jewish residents. From the jump, readers are introduced to a decades-old mystery, resurfacing when a skeleton is discovered during construction in the '70s.

The book unspools the series of events leading up to the foreshadowed demise, alongside the stories of the neighborhood and how it has evolved over time with complex relationships and demographic shifts.

A unique and powerful part of McBride's novel is the variety of perspectives offered as the tale is told. He introduces a cacophony of opinions, values, prejudices, complicities, loyalties, and histories that lend robust richness to the residents of Chicken Hill. There is a crime, yes, but there is a lot more to it than just a simple case of whodunit. Ultimately, the story emphasizes mutuality coupled with luck to bring justice and redemption, often in unconventional ways.

The first few chapters were a little tough to get into for me, but once I found my groove I felt very invested in the story, and fascinated by McBride's style. This might be a good pick for you if you enjoy literary fiction with historical elements and light suspense.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals

Saidiya Hartman

4.25

challenging dark emotional informative inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

Powerful, subversive, important, and sad. Saidiya Hartman centers the lives of the Black women on the margins of the early 20th century, mostly those in NYC and Philadelphia. She does so with a historian's diligence paired with a soulful creativity to bring depth to stories otherwise left out. A particularly clever device is her infusion of a chorus throughout, pointing repeatedly to the fact that the stories she shares are not unique, but representative of scores of Black women facing incredibly unjust lives.

Below l've included an excerpt from the final chapter about this choice which gives both a peek into the book's style and the gravity of its contents:

The chorus bears all of it for us. The Greek etymology of the word chorus refers to dance within an enclosure. What better articulates the long history of struggle, the ceaseless practice of black radicalism and refusal, the tumult and upheaval of open rebellion than the acts of collaboration and improvisation that unfold within the space of enclosure? The chorus is the vehicle for another kind of story, not of the great man or the tragic hero, but one in which all modalities play a part, where the headless group incites change, where mutual aid provides the resource for collective action, not leader and mass, where the untranslatable songs and seeming nonsense make good the promise of revolution. The chorus propels transformation. It is an incubator of possibility, an assembly sustaining dreams of the otherwise.... The collective movement points toward what awaits us, what has yet to come into view, what they anticipate - the time and place better than here; a glimpse of the earth not owned by anyone. So everything depends on them and not the hero occupying center stage, preening and sovereign. Inside the circle it is clear that every song is really the same song, but crooned in infinite variety, every story altered and unchanging: How can I live? I want to be free. Hold on.

If you appreciated Tiya Miles's All That She Carried, Quiara Alegría Hudes's My Broken Language, or Daphne Palasi Andreades's Brown Girls, you should add this to your TBR.

Radiant: The Dancer, the Scientist, and a Friendship Forged in Light

Liz Heinecke

5.0

adventurous hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad fast-paced

Liz Heinecke’s dual biography of Marie Curie and Loïe Fuller is an engrossing story of two women at the tops of their fields whose passionate curiosity lead them to a generative, supportive friendship. Written with pace and creativity, I learned about these luminaries and came away with refreshed appreciation for the world’s innovators.

I was familiar with Marie Curie in the way most everyone is: the woman scientist who discovered radium and won the Nobel prize. There are certainly other biographies of her out there — likely more robust and granular — but this rendition followed the complete arc of her life with special emphasis on the intersections with artist Loïe Fuller. Unlike Marie Curie, I was not familiar with Fuller, which is honestly sort of bonkers given my dance background and love of theater. While one of these women achieved lasting notoriety, the other has largely faded from memory despite her intense, lasting impacts on performance arts. She developed extraordinary lighting techniques for the stage where she performed highly creative dances that created mesmerizing illusions. Her interest in light ultimately led her to reach out to Marie Curie who had recently discovered radioactivity and was working to isolate radium — an element that gives off light.

Many parts of their stories are surreal and improbable in the way that some of the best nonfiction is. There is romance and scandal and breakthroughs and war and murder and heartbreak, all on the backdrop of Paris at the turn of the century with a star-studded background cast. Author Liz Heinecke uses creative nonfiction to imbue the stories with dialogue and life all while bringing to the fore two truly extraordinary women. If you were already a casual fan of Marie Curie, this will make you even more impressed. And brace yourself for Loïe Fuller — a woman full of drive and wonder whose historical erasure is a real shame.

All in all, a fantastic read that I’d recommend without reservation!

Content Warnings

The Broadcast 41: Women and the Anti-Communist Blacklist

Carol A. Stabile

3.0

challenging informative sad tense slow-paced

This book serves as an excellent primer on FBI tactics and attitude in the 1950s. I learned a great deal about Hoover’s approach and the cultivation of a G-Man persona. The Bureau promoted a misogynistic, racist worldview and made use of media channels and friendly journalists to validate their existence. Did you know that the preponderance of police procedurals embedded in our television culture is a direct result of FBI influence?

The American Business Consultants was a private firm founded by former agents that relied on its implied ties to the FBI to stoke fear and legitimize its blacklist, profiting off said concerns and offering to “clear” the accused. Their actions ruined many a career and effectively stopped progressive programming in its tracks (with the ironic exception of children’s shows which they didn’t consider worth the effort).

While that part of the book was fascinating and detailed, I was once again struck by disappointment in that the purported focus of the book — the women — did not make up a majority of the content. The final chapter explores what media could have been like if the inclusive, creative minds that had been blacklisted had a chance to create the programming they’d envisioned. But on the whole, I learned a lot less about these women than about the FBI’s efforts during the Cold War.

Several of the women mentioned were actually part of one of my favorite reads from a few years back: How Women Invented Television by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong. Chronologically, it takes place before the Broadcast 41, but does an excellent job of profiling several prominent women who were shaping the industry ahead of this ideological crackdown. I strongly recommend it.