Long Division
2013 • 276 pages
Ratings11
Average rating3.8
15
Ratings11
Average rating3.8
Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Fiction From Kiese Laymon, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Heavy, comes a “funny, astute, searching” (The Wall Street Journal) debut novel about Black teenagers that is a satirical exploration of celebrity, authorship, violence, religion, and coming of age in post-Katrina Mississippi. Written in a voice that’s alternately humorous, lacerating, and wise, Long Division features two interwoven stories. In the first, it’s 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, fourteen-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-version of City, along with his friend and love interest, 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 items with them all the way back to 1964, to help another time-traveler they meet to protect his family from the Ku Klux Klan. City’s two stories ultimately converge in the work shed behind his grandmother’s house, where he discovers the key to Baize’s disappearance. Brilliantly “skewering the disingenuous masquerade of institutional racism” (Publishers Weekly), this dreamlike “smart, funny, and sharp” (Jesmyn Ward), novel shows the work that young Black Americans must do, while living under the shadow of a history “that they only gropingly understand and must try to fill in for themselves” (The Wall Street Journal).
Reviews with the most likes.
This one was interesting, and I'm still processing it. I'd have to read parts of this again to fully understand it, which is fun. I knew this was going to be a good time because A) I loved Laymon's memoir, so I knew this would be well-written and B) the book has a physical structure unlike that which I've seen before: two parts that start from opposite ends of the book (as in, an identical front and back cover, and the second part of the book is upside-down from the first, starting from the back cover which could be the front cover, starting the pages over at 1).
The books are somehow the continuation of the same story, but I'd have to read it again to see how all the puzzle pieces match up. Beyond the interesting narrative structure, the writing style of this book is a GD delight. The main character, a teenager named City, is hilarious, but also complex and heavy with the realities of growing up black in our society. His character feels incredibly true, while the other characters feel magical and unreal in a way that fits perfectly with the story.
This book makes us ask big, hard questions of ourselves and the world we live in, but is fun and fantastical at the same time. Absolutely recommend for a simultaneously fun and challenging read.
