An epic tale of adventure that brings to mind characters you never forget: Meg Murry in A Wrinkle in Time, Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn. Quite simply the best book that I have read in a very, very long time. Du Bois is simply magnificent.” - Ron Charles, Washington Post With the depth of its intelligence and the breadth of its vision, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Yes, at roughly 800 pages, it is, indeed, a mountain to climb, but the journey is engrossing, and the view from the summit will transform your understanding of America. Du Bois is the kind of book that comes around only once a decade. “Whatever must be said to get you to heft this daunting debut novel by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, I’ll say, because The Love Songs of W.E.B. In doing so Ailey must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of oppression and resistance, bondage and independence, cruelty and resilience that is the story-and the song-of America itself. To come to terms with her own identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her family’s past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of ancestors-Indigenous, Black, and white-in the deep South. From an early age, Ailey fights a battle for belonging that’s made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma, as well as the whispers of women-her mother, Belle, her sister, Lydia, and a maternal line reaching back two centuries-that urge Ailey to succeed in their stead. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans-the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother Pearl, the descendant of enslaved Georgians and tenant farmers-Ailey carries Du Bois’s Problem on her shoulders.Īiley is reared in the north in the City but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother’s family has lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa in bondage. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois’s words all too well. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called “Double Consciousness,” a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. The NAACP Image Award-winning poet makes her fiction debut with this magisterial epic-an intimate yet sweeping novel with all the luminescence and force of Homegoing Sing, Unburied, Sing and The Water Dancer-that chronicles the journey of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade through the Civil War to our own tumultuous era. I was just enraptured by the lineage and the story of this modern African-American family.
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2021.
An instant New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today Bestseller
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