Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Coster (Halsey Street) returns with a rich if diffuse story of loss, betrayal, and systemic racism, centered on two families spanning the 1990s to the present, set mainly in the Piedmont area of North Carolina. In 1992, six-year-old Gee's, father, Ray, gets killed in front of him. Noelle Ventura grows up on the other side of town, and though her father, Robbie, is from Colombia, she passes for white. In 2002, the two families intersect when Gee, who is Black, is bussed to Noelle's high school. Her white mother, Lacey May, who struggled to support three children while Robbie was in jail, joins a group of parents who protest the school's integration, a racist position that forces Noelle to choose between Lacey May and her growing love for Gee. In a series of abrupt shifts, Coster portrays Noelle as a housewife in 2018 Atlanta, and her Black husband, Nelson, who works as a photographer in 2018 Paris and sleeps with a white woman. In 2018, Lacey May's daughters reluctantly return home to visit after hearing she has cancer, setting off a series of confrontations and reconciliations. While Coster's exploration of race is powerful, the scattered plotting dampens the impact of the various stories. It's undoubtedly ambitious, but it doesn't hang together. Agent: Keene Benton, Kristyn, ICM Partners. (Mar.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Coster's (Halsey Street) North Carolina-set novel starts in 1992, when Gee, a six-year-old Black boy, witnesses the brutal murder of his stepfather Ray, who was intervening in an altercation to defend Gee and Gee's mother Jade. The plot moves jerkily back and forth in time, viewpoint, and locale. It jumps forward to Gee's enrollment in a newly (and contentiously) integrated high school, where he and Jade meet the Colombian American Ventura family: mother Lacey May, a brash and unreasonable woman; her drug-addicted husband Robbie; and their three daughters. When Noelle Ventura and Gee participate in the school play, the town's integration debate heats up. There are some winning moments, such as when Diane Ventura comes out and marries her girlfriend; however, Lacey May's prolonged cancer battle is more tedious than distressing. Narrator Bahni Turpin gallantly and flawlessly presents the text and differentiates the huge cast of characters, with varied personalities and accents. Her best portrayals are Gee at every age, and kindhearted Linette, a minor character who lovingly nurtures Gee when he most needs it. VERDICT Recommend to listeners who enjoy family sagas.--Susan G. Baird, formerly at Oak Lawn P.L., IL
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Coster, a Kirkus Prize finalist for Halsey Street (2018), returns with an intergenerational saga of two North Carolina families inextricably connected by trauma and love. In a city in the Piedmont in the fall of 1992, Ray is baking croissants, preparing for the day that's supposed to change his life: A reporter is coming to profile the cafe he co-founded that has since become "his everything." If business picks up afterward, he already has a list of things he'll do. Buy his girlfriend, Jade, a ring and marry her. Buy Jade's 6-year-old son, Gee--who is, for all practical purposes, also his son now--a chest of drawers. Take them on a trip. None of it will happen: That afternoon, Ray is shot and killed. Jade's cousin owed money to a guy; Ray was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then Coster skips forward a few years, to the outskirts of that city, where a woman named Lacey May Ventura is trying to raise three daughters on no money while her troubled husband is in prison; an unrelated story, on the surface, a single mother making compromises to get by. The story of the past, though, is then interrupted by dispatches from the present: In the Atlanta suburbs, Noelle, the oldest of the Ventura girls, is now a theater director in a disintegrating marriage. Jumping backward and forward in time and bouncing between families, Coster weaves together a gripping portrait of generational pain. But the details of her plot--carefully constructed, if not especially subtle--pale in comparison to her characters, who are startling in their quiet humanity. Coster is an exacting observer but also an endlessly generous one, approaching her cast with a sharp eye and deep warmth. The overlapping pieces fit together, of course, but it's the individual moments that are exquisite, each chapter a tiny snapshot of a whole world. Tender but--miraculously--never sentimental. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
