Long Division: A Novel [B2033]

2021 french-flap PB in gift-worthy condition. Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Fiction. From the 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).

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "I loved time travelling as a way to explore racism through the decades and lived experience of ancestors. the satire was cutting and bold. This book made me gasp, tear up and giggle. I felt so invested in the story line, I gobbled up the last 100 pages. So thankful for recommendations from friends ?"; "I needed to sit with this one for a little before reviewing because this is one of the most unique books I've ever read, and while I was confused throughout most of it, I did really enjoy it. It's about two interwoven stories and when you finish the first one, you literally have to turn the book over and upside down because the second story starts from the back, and the two meet in the middle. The book doesn't make sense until the very end, but it has such a unique narrative voice and has a lot to say about some important topics."; "Such an interesting ancestral time machine of a book. Really dives in the power of words and how history can be rewritten. I think I figured out some of the connections that the book made without fully saying it."; "This one hurt my brain in a good way."; "Science fiction with mystery, an intricate puzzle, humor, love, identity, struggle, coming of age . . . I won't stop thinking about this one anytime soon. Wow."