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288 pages, Paperback
First published June 11, 2013
6. Only those who can read, write, and love can move back or forward through time.This book did it for me. Granted, I'm a nerd for stories that look deeply at identity and stories that thoughtfully use time travel--and this book COMBINES them--but I didn't expect this story. I was thrown and have been processing it ever since. Like, a complete run-and-fetch-my-journal-so-I-can-meditate-and-respond-to-it sort of reaction. It put into words, into stories, into action so many issues and questions I've wrestled with in my own life. I'm trying to resist the impulse to say that it skewers the idea that our society can be "post" anything, let alone post-racial, because "skewers" is too violent for what I mean. The analytical work going on in this book isn't violent, just immensely, relentlessly precise. Shalaya Crump herself would like it for being so straight on, and for being kind to (while still expecting the best out of) the people within its pages.True/False
9. Past, present, and future exist within you and you change them by changing the way you live your life.True/False
"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."