Book of the Day Roundup: July 17-21, 2023
Lies about Black People
How to Combat Racist Stereotypes and Why It Matters
Omekongo Dibinga
Michael Eric Dyson, contributor
Prometheus
Hardcover $26.95 (232pp)
978-1-63388-878-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Lies about Black People is an antiracist, activist text that dissects harmful racist myths.
With a penetrating blend of history, anecdotes, interviews, and poetry, Omekongo Dibinga analyzes some common stereotypes about Black people, all of which continue to inflict trauma and some of which have ended in Black people’s deaths. The book shows how such lies are embedded in the US’s disempowering vocabulary, policies, and social structures. Designed to justify slavery first, they were later used to separate racial groups and concentrate wealth and power among white people.
Without blame and with buckets of positivity, Dibinga exhorts his audience to work on understanding their own biases and to combat resurgent racism using his concrete strategies. He addresses his own education on certain racial and gender topics to demonstrate the need for continual learning. Thoughtful questions and sidebar activities challenge audiences to examine how they consider various issues, their racial empathy, and how they might act differently to challenge racism in the future. Summaries of interviews with people from diverse ethnic backgrounds and ages make a variety of experiences with racism, hopes for the US future, and feelings of outrage and loss palpable.
The book is intriguing as it shows how Irish and Italian immigrants (who were once considered non-white) were also the subject of racist attacks. It details the different paths that these communities took to assimilate into “that magical, mythical neighborhood of Whiteness.” And Dibinga’s consideration of contemporary racial biases among Asian and Latino communities is noteworthy, showing how these intersect with people’s desires for all the perks of white privilege at the expense of Black scapegoats.
Brimming with historical and contemporary examples, Lies about Black People is an illuminating, persuasive overview of the ways racism harms Black Americans and poisons the country’s culture and economic health.
RACHEL JAGARESKI (June 27, 2023)
Café Unfiltered
Jean-Philippe Blondel
Alison Anderson, translator
New Vessel Press
Softcover $17.95 (232pp)
978-1-954404-20-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Jean-Philippe Blondel’s delicate and delightful novel Café Unfiltered dips into the musings of several people who have gathered in a French café over the course of one day.
In France, the COVID-19 lockdown has just been lifted. Le Tom’s customers begin to venture back to the café, which is already open at 9:00 a.m. when the narrative begins. Here, Chloe, a thirty-one-year-old woman, sits alone, draws, and sips her coffee, having returned to France from Finland for reasons that are revealed as the day wears on.
While Le Tom’s owner, Fabrice, his employee Jose, and the café’s former owner, Jocelyne, are recurrent presences, others appear to have a drink or a meal and then move on. A mother meets her adult son to tell him that she is divorcing his father. An author meets an old friend, once the object of his unrequited love, after reconnecting with him on social media. These customers are linked through momentary asides, as when they notice each other at another table.
Much of the book’s activity, though, occurs not on this day, but in the café patrons’ and staff’s past, with events related through inner monologues. For some of them, including Jose, the recent lockdown led to reckonings or consequential choices; Jose plans to act in the near future. And although Chloe sits drinking, eating, drawing, and chatting all day, her life is about to change, too.
The book’s compressed time frame and its personal stories conveyed across tables result in a sense of intimacy. By the time morning comes, some of these characters feel like passing acquaintances, but others burrow into the heart like old friends.
Café Unfiltered is a warm hug of a novel that brims with hope.
SUZANNE KAMATA (June 27, 2023)
What I’d Rather Not Think About
Jente Posthuma
Sarah Timmer Harvey, translator
Scribe
Softcover $15.00 (224pp)
978-1-957363-35-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Jente Posthuma’s bittersweet novel What I’d Rather Not Think About, a woman who is bereft after her twin brother’s suicide searches to understand his mental illness.
The fraternal twins at the center of the story have peculiar obsessions. They share a fixation on suicide statistics. They moved to Amsterdam to study English, chose apartments on the same square, and plotted a joint move to New York City. But he dropped out of university to work at a gay bar and changed to be more like his boyfriends, and the siblings drifted apart. Now, she works part-time in a vintage shop and amasses a huge collection of sweaters.
The narrator never discloses her name; she used to be Two and her brother One because he was born forty-five minutes before her. The way that she defines herself in relation to him and his absence emphasizes the overwhelming nature of her loss. “My brother had gone and with him, all of my past,” she writes.
But the past sees a resurgence, alternating with the present in the book’s few-page vignettes. The twins’ father leaving when they were eleven was a significant early trauma; then, One came out at sixteen, though Two had intuited his sexual orientation when they were eight (a fact revealed through the charming, subtle fact of them falling in love with the same television presenter).
With no speech marks, the conversations blend into cogitation and memories. Two meets with a therapist to parse her conflicting emotions and contemplate the meaning of self-harm. Suicide stories pervade the text, with the twins trading trivia about Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, September 11, 2001, and the Holocaust. A wry tone, however, tempers the bleakness.
What I’d Rather Not Think About is a forthright novel in which mental health, sexual orientation, and suicide are subjects of frank, empathetic consideration.
REBECCA FOSTER (June 27, 2023)
Half-Life of a Stolen Sister
Rachel Cantor
Soho Press
Hardcover $26.00 (384pp)
978-1-64129-464-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Imagination runs wild in Rachel Cantor’s historical novel Half-Life of a Stolen Sister, an innovative spin on the lives and work of the Brontë sisters.
Maria’s mother is unwell. She no longer takes care of Maria’s younger siblings, soothes her husband’s temper, or hums songs under her breath. Knowing that her death is approaching, this matriarch gathers her six children and speaks to each of them in turn. She exhorts Maria to take care of her siblings, and then she dies.
But Maria is too young to fulfill her mother’s wish, and her father is incapable of taking care of his children himself. Thus, Maria is sent to school with three of her sisters. She and Elizabeth succumb to illness due to neglect and the school’s poor living conditions. Her surviving siblings, who now live with their emotionally distant father and a stern aunt, disappear into a fantasy world of their own creation, Glass Town.
Cantor spins the known biographies of the Brontë siblings into a surrealist, eccentric story where modernity blends with the archaic. The chapters are written in prose, poetry, and dialogue, in the form of letters, screenplays, transcripts, and diaries. Told from inside the dreamscape of a child’s vibrant mind, an alternative universe is created wherein the imagined is real, and reality is a scary dream.
As the Brontës grow into adulthood, the imagined recedes and reality takes over. One by one, the remaining siblings pass away, leaving their father as the sole survivor of his once large family.
Previous knowledge about the Brontës facilitates understanding herein. The simultaneous rivalry and unconditional love between the siblings is a situation that’s universal, though. Half-Life of a Stolen Sister is an eccentric historical novel that retells the story of the Brontë family with flair.
ERIKA HARLITZ KERN (June 27, 2023)
Wishes of the World
Melissa Stiveson
Khoa Le, illustrator
Sleeping Bear Press
Hardcover $18.99 (32pp)
978-1-5341-1175-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Stunning illustrations employ intricate patterns and brilliant colors to bring the magic of a wish to life in this globe-trotting picture book. From wishes tied to kites in Guatemala to wishes swinging from bamboo in Japan, the book depicts children across a variety of cultures engaging in their unique ways of wishing; though their methods may differ, the hope and magic of wishes are universal.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (June 27, 2023)
Barbara Hodge
