Hello,
This week’s recommendation is a fiction novel about race. Not exactly a light read, but very eye-opening.
Have a great week!
mariana
Why did I read this book?
My friend Alejandra and my friend Laurita have great taste in books and they always give me great recommendations. When they both recommended this book, I immediately added it to my list.
I finally read it a few months ago on a flight back to London (...when we could still fly…) and I devoured it.
What is the book about?
Racial injustice: This book narrates the story of a black man who is unjustly sent to jail, and the effects this has on his newly formed marriage and his family. In the author’s words: “This is the story about a family affected by wrongful conviction, about what they owe each other and the ways that they will move forward.” Through the story, the author tries to convey the fear black people experience in their everyday lives of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, of ending up wrongly convicted for a crime they didn’t commit just because of the colour of their skin.
What couples “owe” one another in a marriage: How is a young couple supposed to keep their marriage going when one of its members is in jail? How do you keep your love alive? How long can the memories of your relationship fuel loyalty? How do you keep going when the system that’s supposed to protect you has profoundly failed you? In this story, we can see the outcomes of the battle between internal forces that unite people vs. external forces that separate them.
A life, interrupted: How do you start again when all the best years of your life have been robbed from you? As a convict with a 12-year sentence, your life hits pause, your dreams are shattered, your family plans cancelled. Everything you worked so hard for, gone down the drain. How are you supposed to cope with this?
Why should you read it?
An eye-opening story: We often read headlines and news about black people being singled out by the police and the justice system. This book offers the part of the story that you never hear about: the implications for the convicted whose life is halted all of a sudden, and the implications for their family, whose life will never be the same again. The writing makes you truly empathise with its characters who are suffocated by the social structures. You face the dilemma each character is facing, you feel their pain, and you can’t help but wonder what you would have done in their place.
A reflection on justice systems and the biases they carry: Through Roy’s and Celeste’s story, you’ll be able to grasp the long-term consequences of accusing and convicting someone that looks like the likely perpetrator of a crime, simply because of the colour of their skin. By capturing both the time they spent together and the time they were forced to be apart, you’ll be able to witness the lifelong impact that racism and biases have on the lives of innocent people and their families.
“Our house isn’t simply empty, our home has been emptied. Love makes a place in your life, it makes a place for itself in your bed. Invisibly, it makes a place in your body, rerouting all your blood vessels, throbbing right alongside your heart. When it’s gone, nothing is whole again.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage
Links to buy the book
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UK
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US
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Favourite quotes
//The purpose of this section is to share some of my favourite book bits, so you can come back to them when you finish a book, if you wish to do so. I’ve put in bold my favourite ones, in case you want to read a few (or all) ahead of the book.//
“There are two kinds of people in the world, those who leave home, and those who don’t.”
“But home isn’t where you land; home is where you launch. You can’t pick your home any more than you can choose your family. In poker, you get five cards. Three of them you can swap out, but two are yours to keep: family and native land.”
“If my childhood were a sandwich, there would be no meat hanging off the bread. We had what we needed and nothing more. “And nothing less,” my mama would have said, and then wrapped me in one of her lemon-drop hugs.”
“Nobody can really satisfy their mama when it comes to the ladies.”
“I’m not going to remind my kids that somebody died in order for me to do everyday things.”
“Now Celestial promises that she will never say that they have to be twice as good to get half as much. “Even if it’s true,” she said, “what kind of thing is that to say to a five-year-old?”
“I didn’t point out that you had to be married in order to cheat at all.”
“If you have a woman, you recognize when you have said the wrong thing. Somehow she rearranges the ions in the air and you can’t breathe as well.”
“Every man knows what it is to spread himself around. But with my mother and Celestial, I was actually split down the middle. Olive brought me into this world and trained me up to be the man I recognized as myself. But Celestial was the portal to the rest of my life, the shiny door to the next level.”
“I pushed my way through two cinnamon-swirled helpings because everybody knows the way to make a bad matter worse with a southern woman is to refuse her food.”
“I would never tell her, but I liked being stronger than she was, the way I could literally sweep her off her feet.”
“She swiveled and we kissed like teenagers, making out under the bridge. It was a wonderful feeling to be grown and yet young. To be married but not settled. To be tied down yet free.”
“Memory is a queer creature, an eccentric curator.”
“At the Piney Woods, we tangled about history, and there is no fair fight to be waged about the past.”
“Love is the enemy of sound judgment, and occasionally this is in service of the good.”
“I can get that, in a way.” Roy raised my hand to his lips. “Sometimes when you like where you end up, you don’t care how you got there.”
“I never want to feel grateful about being deceived.”
“I still don’t like it. I want us to be on the up-and-up. I don’t want our kid to inherit all of our secrets.”
“Back then, I didn’t know what forever looked like. Maybe I don’t even know now. But that night in the Piney Woods, I believed that our marriage was a fine-spun tapestry, fragile but fixable. We tore it often and mended it, always with a silken thread, lovely but sure to give way.”
“Then, I didn’t know that our bodies can know things before they happen, so when my eyes suddenly filled with tears, I thought this was the unpredictable effect of emotion.”
“I felt blessed in the old-fashioned sense, in the way that anyone would be in finding someone whose smell you enjoyed.”
“Is motherhood really optional when you’re a perfectly normal woman married to a perfectly normal man?”
“He stood again and cried, not like a baby, but in the way that only a grown man can cry, from the bottom of his feet up through his torso and finally through his mouth. When a man wails like that you know it’s all the tears that he was never allowed to shed, from Little League disappointment to teenage heartbreak, all the way to whatever injured his spirit just last year.”
“...the fact that I am the only living person within these walls. Up until now, I thought I knew what was and wasn’t possible. Maybe that’s what innocence is, having no way to predict the pain of the future. When something happens that eclipses the imaginable, it changes a person. It’s like the difference between a raw egg and a scrambled egg. It’s the same thing, but it’s not the same at all. That’s the best way that I can put it. I look in the mirror and I know it’s me, but I can’t quite recognize myself.”
“Our house isn’t simply empty, our home has been emptied. Love makes a place in your life, it makes a place for itself in your bed. Invisibly, it makes a place in your body, rerouting all your blood vessels, throbbing right alongside your heart. When it’s gone, nothing is whole again.”
“There’s no appealing a cop’s bullet.”
“If you’re a grown woman and you have more than ten dollars in the bank, nobody understands why you can’t have a baby.”
“Every girl needs a wise and reassuring aunt.”
“My body apparently was fertile soil, but my life was not. You may feel that you’re carrying a burden, but I shoulder a load as well.”
“It’s not our dream, but it’s dream-adjacent.”
“You don’t know how demoralizing it is to be a man with nothing to offer a woman.”
“Marriage is between two people. There is no studio audience.”
“A marriage is more than your heart, it’s your life. And we are not sharing ours.”
“I urge you not to disconnect from the people who remind you of the life you once had and the life you want to live again.”
“Sometimes I envy the children today with all their tae kwon do, psychotherapy, and language immersion, but at the same time, I appreciate that back then being little meant you really didn’t have to do anything but stay alive and have fun.”
“The truth is that you never want your sister to marry at all.”
“You also have to work with the love you are given, with all of the complications clanging behind it like tin cans tied to a bridal sedan.”
“A paper clip could best the catch, but when a woman shuts you out, picking the lock won’t let you back in.”
“We often slept close, sometimes sharing a single pillow. But this night, I felt like I needed to be invited, and it didn’t look like an offer was coming. You can never know another person’s mind; this is one thing I have learned.”
“Three takes you from being a couple to being a family, upping the consequences for walking away, upping the pleasure quotient for staying home.”
“Was I being kind, or was I just weak?”
“One of the hurdles of adulthood is when holidays become measuring sticks against which you always fall short. For children, Thanksgiving is about turkey and Christmas is about presents. Grown up, you learn that all holidays are about family, and few can win there.”
“According to the ruby, Andre is my fiancé, but Roy’s diamond, so white that it’s blue, insists that this is impossible. But who listens to the wisdom of jewelry? Only our bodies know the truth. Bones don’t lie. What else hides in my jewelry box? A small tooth, ivory like antique lace, with a serrated edge like a steak knife.”
“I respect his ambition; I had mine. But you don’t want to spend the rest of your life with a man who has something to prove.”
“Sweets are curious, temperamental, and moody. Any cake mixed by hand on this day would slump in the oven, refusing to rise.”
“There was comfort in the truth, no matter how difficult.”
“The only thing I know for sure is that everyone else’s life has moved forward, just not yours.””
“According to him, the key is to wipe your mind clean. The future is what I should think about. But he never explained how I was supposed to not pine for what I used to have. Walter didn’t understand because there is nothing behind him but missed opportunities and regret. For him, the chance to start anew would be a reprieve, but for me it would be the mother of all setbacks.”
“It takes being together to another level when you go to bed for a purpose larger than your own feelings.”
“But how you feel love and understand love are two different things.”
“Something you learn in there: keep your mind on what’s important.”
“Women have that way of asking you more than what they want to know.”
“There is a certain type of Christian woman who can’t resist a godless man, keeping his soul safe on her knees.”
“I watched him for a while longer, and I wondered if this is what it meant to move on, to learn to live in a new way without someone.”
“Her type of man is one with a point of view. Somebody who thinks he has figured out how this life thing works.”
“But a man who is a father to a daughter is different from one who is a father to a son. One is the left shoe and the other is the right. They are the same but not interchangeable.”
“I don’t believe that blood makes a family; kin is the circle you create, hands held tight. There is something to shared genetics, but the question is, what exactly is that something? It matters that I didn’t grow up with my father. It’s kind of like having one leg that’s a half inch shorter than the other. You can walk, but there will be”
“But she never told me anything about saying good-bye, because as far as she was concerned, real men didn’t have any need for farewells because real men stay.”
“Is it love, or is it convenience?” Gloria asked me that Thanksgiving Day after my father had stormed upstairs and Andre went to gather our coats. She explained that convenience, habit, comfort, obligation—these are all things that wear the same clothing as love sometimes. Did I think this thing with Andre was maybe too easy? He is literally the boy next door.”
“Gloria once told me that your best quality is also your worst.”
“There should be a word, I thought, for this experience when you’re surprised but at the same time the moment feels completely inevitable.”
“I wouldn’t have answered even if he hadn’t cut off my breath with a kiss that tasted like desire streaked through with anger. Yes means yes and no means no, but what is the meaning of silence?”
“She said that love can change its shape, but for me at least, this is a lie.”
“It costs you to hurt people.”