I read this book for book club, and I honestly don't think I would've finished it otherwise. I'm not even really sure what star rating to give this book because I'm still not entirely sure what it was about.
"Kiese Laymon’s debut novel is a Twain-esque exploration of celebrity, authorship, violence, religion, and coming of age in Post-Katrina Mississippi, written in a voice that’s alternately funny, lacerating, and wise. The book contains two interwoven stories. In the first, it’s 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, 14-year-old Citoyen "City" Coldson becomes an overnight YouTube celebrity. The next day, he’s sent to stay with his grandmother in the small coastal community of Melahatchie, where a young girl named Baize Shephard has recently disappeared.
Before leaving, City is given a strange book without an author called Long Division. He learns that one of the book’s main characters is also named City Coldson--but Long Division is set in 1985. This 1985 City, along with his friend and love-object, Shalaya Crump, discovers a way to travel into the future, and steals a laptop and cellphone from an orphaned teenage rapper called...Baize Shephard. They ultimately take these with them all the way back to 1964, to help another time-traveler they meet protect his family from the Klan.
City’s two stories ultimately converge in the mysterious work shed behind his grandmother’s, where he discovers the key to Baize’s disappearance."
- from Storygraph
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This book was strange. The format is what caught my attention – two books in one, where you actually flip the physical book over halfway through and start reading from the back. But once I actually got in, I honestly struggled with this one. The first book felt like nothing really happened, and then in the second book everything happened but with no real explanation. Some of the questions from the first book were starting to be answered, but then it never felt like they were fully answered enough for me to make sense of it. We saw what happened to Baize, but what did it mean? And what on earth did the guy in the work shed have to do with any of it, as the synopsis suggests? All in all, I left this book confused and uncertain what to think.
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Content Warnings: Racism, Homophobia, Hate Crimes, Antisemitism, Death of a parent, Violence
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