Review: 'Riot Baby'

Riot Baby

By Tochi Onyebuchi

Speculative Fiction

Tor.com

A short novel that builds its emotional force like a wave that swirls and soars and crashes, Riot Baby tells the story of a brother and sister in black America.

Tochi Onyebuchi's first novel for adults centers on Kev, born during the Rodney King riots, and his older sister, Ella. She has a Thing, a gift, a curse that puts the novel in the fantasy genre. But the Thing is used as a way to show the scope of how black people have been humiliated, hurt and killed in the last 30 years. 

As a child, Ella could see the future of the people she encounters. In time, she is able to astral project. She grows powerful enough that she can take her brother on journeys. When Kev goes to prison, it's a way for them to remain connected. When Kev is put in solitary, Ella can be there and she can take his spirit out of his cell.

His time there is brutal, and that it doesn't rob Kev of his soul is testimony how perhaps we are not all monsters inside, even though the system is in place to try to do that, one way or another:

The places that made money off you by charging you for tickets and scheduling court dates when they knew you couldn’t make it, then fining you for those missed dates if they don’t jail you first, then they say they’ll graciously set you up with a payment plan, then you get a day or two late one month and they put out a warrant, then when they do get you in jail, you gotta post $2,000 bond or some shit like that that they know you can’t pay, and that’s how it starts. While in jail, you miss your job interview, and when you finally get your day in court, they say you gotta change out of your jumpsuit, but you gotta put on the same funky clothes you spent however long getting arrested in and you gotta stand in that courtroom smelling like rotten poom-poom, handcuffed, and you gotta do all you can to even feel like a person still. If you got family, maybe your mama can borrow against her life insurance policy to post your bond.

It's a system meant to keep black people down.

Maybe they kill you in here. But maybe you make it out. Not out from behind bars, but out of wherever it is they try to put you when they put you behind bars.

Toward the end of the book, as Kev's life changes, this is made even more explicit. His life, Onyebuchi shows, does not belong to him regardless of his legal status. It's too real, too true to be dismissed as speculative fiction. 

Ella is angry because of her Thing, because of her mother's lifelong hurt, because of her brother's imprisonment. But she also is on a quest to see as much of the world and the way people are as possible. The sections in which she passes unseen through throngs of people is both a use of the gift that her author bestowed on her, and commentary on how black people are seen unless they are wanted for something.

"What might the opposite of injustice look like?"

Onyebuchi whirls up an epiphany of what might be at the end. There is the searing desire for a new beginning, and it is as painful as the scenes of new life that are depicted earlier in the story.

Onyebuchi has written several YA novels, and brings so many parts of his wide educational background to inform this novel. This is a man who has earned an undergrad degree from Yale, an MFA in screenwriting, a master's in economic law and a law degree from Columbia Law School. He is a strong advocate for others, being part of the reason social media discussed #PublishingPaidMe to reveal racial disparities in the book world.

Also, through June 24, there is a social media campaign to purchase at least two books by black authors. Whether you love to read literary fiction, YA fantasy, romance, mysteries or nonfiction, there are multitudes of volumes from which to choose.

Some of my favorites include Homegoing, The Turner House, The Water Dancer, everything by Colson Whitehead and Deacon King Kong.

Copyright Lynne Perednia 2020

Review: 'Deacon King Kong'

Deacon King Kong

By James McBride

Literary Fiction

Riverhead Books

The best kind of novel set in the past that shines a light on the era in which it is set also illuminates aspects of today.

That's the kind of novel Deacon King Kong by James McBride is.

The stage is set with the elderly deacon of Five Hands Church in a 1969 New York City housing project walking up to the local young drug dealer and shooting an old gun at him. The deacon, known around the neighborhood as Sportcoat, is usually drunk, has survived numerous physical accidents and is mourning the death of his wife two years ago. He also was baseball coach to the young drug dealer, Deems, when he was a kid.

But if it looks like this is going to be a hardened, dire novel, McBride soon sets the reader right. Sportcoat misses, hitting Deems's ear, and the youngster chokes on the sandwich he has been eating. Sportcoat jumps on top of Deems, who is on all fours, and attempts the Heimlich maneuver. It does not look like an act of mercy to the gossiping neighborhood.

Many of the characters are looking for something. Sportcoat is always on the look-out for more of the homemade hootch, known as King Kong. He's also trying to find the Christmas fund box that his late wife hid somewhere, because the rest of the congregation would like their money. Deems is looking to expand his business. His supplier is looking to do the same. His supplier's hit man, Earl, is looking to rid the neighborhood of some other characters.

Next to the projects is an old boxcar that is the office of the last of the Italian, um, businessmen in the neighborhood. Tommy Elefante, known as The Elephant, is the only son of a made man who spent years in prison. The Elephant does small-scale jobs but stays away from drugs, which are taking over the mob's business model. An elderly Irish mobster visits one day with an odd story of something that he and the Elephant's father hid decades ago, and which will make their fortunes. Potts Mullan is an old-time square cop with only months to go before retirement, so he's looking to stay out of trouble.

Some of the characters don't know it, but they also are looking to fall in love. And those stories are among the sweetest tales that McBride has to tell.

McBride's story gains depth when the characters level with each other about the travails of living while black, whether it's a hardscrabble life they left behind in the South or the unkind streets of New York. Because the reader has come to know and care about these characters, when they turn serious their words carry all the more weight. And so do the author's words:

Sister Gee looked at the people staring at her ... She'd known most of them her whole life. They stared at her with that look that projects look: the sadness, the suspicion, the weariness, the knowledge that came from living a special misery in a world of misery. Four of their members were down ... And there would be more. The drugs, big drugs, heroin, were here. Nothing could stop it. ... Life in the Cause would lurch forward as it always did. You worked, slaved, fought off rats, the mice, the roaches, the ants, the Housing Authority, the cops, the muggers, and now the drug dealers. You lived a life of disappointment and suffering, of too-hot summers and too-cold winters, surviving in apartments with crummy stoves that didn't work and windows that didn't open and toilets that didn't flush and lead paint that flecked off the walls and poisoned your children, living in awful, dreary apartments built to house Italians who came to America to work the docks, which had emptied of boats, ships, tankers, dreams, money and opportunity the moment the colored and the Latinos arrived. And still New York blamed you for all its problems. ... 

But then, she thought, every once in a while there's a glimmer of hope.

That McBride makes that glimmer of hope work in such a city, in such a time, brings a little glimmer to the current darkness as well. This is a novel to enjoy and treasure.

Copyright Lynne Perednia 2020