I am so loving this book, a first novel by a black writer who lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Hunter about four days in the life of a black Boston-born thirty-something living in Brooklyn and struggling to write while
supporting his white wife and their three children.

The protagonist is broke and he must
come up with more than $12,000 in these four days — money to rent an apartment, pay tuition at his kid’s private school and reclaim his family from his mother-in-law’s summer house.

The book’s masterful first-person voice is intense, poetic, angry, vulnerable, real, and full of thoughtful rage about race and class in New York City. Check out this passage and go buy the book — my copy is already promised to a friend.

“I thought, when he was born, that his eyes would be closed. I didn’t
know if he’d be sleeping or screaming, but that his eyes would be
closed. They weren’t. They were big, almond shaped and copper — almost
like mine. He stared at me. I gave him a knuckle and he gummed it —
still staring. He saw everything about me: the chicken pox scar on my
forehead, the keloid scar beside it, the absent-minded boozy cigarette
burn my father had given me on my stomach. Insults and epithets that
had been thrown like bricks out of car windows or spat like poison
darts from junior high locker rows. Words and threats, which at the
time they’d been uttered, hadn’t seemed to cause me any injury because
they’d not been strong enough or because they’d simply missed. But
holding him, the long skinny boy with the shock of dark hair and the
dusky newborn skin, I realized that I had been hit by all of them and
that they still hurt. My boy was silent, but I shushed him anyway —
long and soft — and I promised him that I would never let them do to
him what had been done to me. He would be safe with me.”