Review by Booklist Review
To complete a historical novel about E. M. Forster's Egyptian lover, Mohammed el-Adl, a writer must confront his own trauma and alienation. On a tight deadline to rework his manuscript, Kip barricades himself in a Brooklyn basement with crackers, bottled water, and a handgun. His ex, Ben, and his friend, Concha, pound on the door to no avail. Kip's imaginative reveries take him to 1917 Egypt, where Forster (post-Howards End but pre-Passage to India) and tram conductor el-Adl fall intensely in love. But racial, colonial, and class fissures doom the romance, and similarities between Kip and el-Adl force Kip to consider his own scarred psyche. Kip hallucinates, masturbates, and eventually breaks out of the basement to travel to desolate Greenland for a dramatic final confrontation. Besides being a talented fiction writer, Donaldson is a psychotherapist, and his debut novel is psychologically acute in its portrayal of a queer Black man crumbling under the weight of personal, historical, and racial trauma. Despite heavy subject material, Kip's irreverent, grandiose narration provides moments of memorable levity.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Donaldson's assured debut finds Kip Starling, a Black queer man of Caribbean descent, writing a novel about E.M. Forster's love for a Black man named Mohammed El Adl. But Kip, who has locked himself in his Brooklyn basement with a gun, is battling writer's block. In addition, his white husband, Ben, wants a divorce, and he's estranged from his best friend, Concha ("If you close your eyes, you can't tell it's not Emma Thompson speaking," he says of her). Donaldson juxtaposes lengthy passages from Kip's novel on racism and invisibility with Kip's own experiences with microaggressions. Later, he boards a plane for London, which makes an emergency landing in Greenland. There, he meets a gay Black man named Mohammed who wants to take Kip into the wilderness to build an igloo "where no white man will reach us. Where we can finally be who we really are." The multiple story lines intrigue, and the writing--"the thick air clung to my skin... like a jilted lover"--is crisp, but Donaldson overstuffs the narrative with ideas to the point that it loses shape. The author clearly has talent, and his work's many fine points suggest he's one to keep an eye on. Agent: Tom Miller, Liza Dawson Assoc. (June)
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Review by Library Journal Review
DEBUT In his first novel, award-nominated playwright Donaldson communicates complex issues of race and sexuality in a nuanced and multifaceted narrative. A Black, gay British writer, Kip Starling is living in Brooklyn with his white American husband, Ben, when he learns that his novel about the secret love affair between famed author E.M. Forster and Black Egyptian tram conductor Mohammed el Adl may have a chance of being published--if only he can rewrite it in six weeks. Kip barricades himself in the basement as he attempts the rewrite from Mohammed's point of view. The narrative then alternates between the perspectives of Mohammed and Kip, whose relationship with Ben parallels the story of Mohammed and the secret love affair to great effect. After being visited by a seemingly paranormal messenger, Kip decides that he needs to escape to the wilderness and lands in Greenland, where the novel reaches a satisfying crescendo connecting past and present while retaining the intimate nature that is its great strength. VERDICT Perceptive and personal, this compelling novel eloquently clarifies ongoing issues of race and racism while authentically telling a unique story. Highly recommended.--Henry Bankhead
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Saddled with the name of his "father's favorite writer" by his colonial-throwback Jamaican parents, aspiring author Kipling Starling is desperate to be published and will do seemingly anything to realize his dream. Encouraged in writing by his schoolteachers and believing himself "useless at anything but," Kip built his personality from the expectations and literary opinions of others and the blueprint for his future from those he saw as his predecessors, assimilating Dostoevsky's style by repeatedly rereading Crime and Punishment and leaving his family in London for New York because fellow "skinny gay black" writer James Baldwin had found success in America. More than recognition of his work or talent, Kip seems to crave the legitimization that acceptance from the predominantly White world of publishing would signify, as he "flounder[s] in the wake of a peculiar invention called Whiteness." Having been kicked out of his MFA program and despairing over a spate of rejections for his historical novel about E.M. Forster's relationship with Egyptian tram conductor Mohammed El Adl, Kip receives an inexplicable invitation to meet with a "publishing legend" who was among his rejectors. In the meeting, she implies that a rewrite from Mohammed's perspective might entice her, but there's a catch: In four weeks' time, "a commercial media conglomerate" will acquire the publisher, and the editor expresses nebulous doubts that she will be allowed to continue acquiring literary fiction after the merger is complete. Thus Kip is launched on a frenzied three-week rewrite quest, and he barricades himself in the basement of the Brooklyn brownstone he shares with his well-intentioned but oblivious White psychotherapist husband, Ben. As boundaries between Mohammed and Kip in his isolation begin to dissolve and a mysterious entity appears, Kip is propelled into a still larger quest to find his "true voice" in a wilderness beyond the confines of Whiteness itself. Though the result is an overplotted and lopsided narrative with a sometimes-tedious start crawling toward a rushed ending, the book still shines at times in the elegance of its prose and its depictions of a stark arctic landscape and in Kip's musings through Mohammed's story on the intersections of colonialism, White supremacy, and queer love, particularly the liberatory potentialities of queer love between Black men. An ambitious if uneven debut exploring the possibilities of love, self-realization, and art under and beyond the White gaze. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
