Blue Talk and Love - bookrastinating.com

236 pages

Published March 25, 2015 by Riverdale Avenue Books.

ISBN:: 978-1-62601-162-5
OCLC Number:: 908554901

The award-wining collection Blue Talk and Love tells the stories of girls and women of color navigating the moods and mazes of urban daily life. Set in various enclaves of New York City — including the middle-class Hamilton Heights section of Harlem, the black queer social world of the West Village, the Spanish-speaking borderland between Harlem and Washington Heights, and historic Tin Pan Alley — the collection uses magic realism, historical fiction, satire and more to highlight young black women's inner lives.

The storylines range widely: a big-bodied teenage girl from Harlem discovers her sexuality in the midst of racial tensions at her Upper East Side school; four young women from Newark, New Jersey, are charged with assaulting the man who threatens to rape them; a pair of conjoined black female twins born into slavery, make their fame as stage performers in the Big City. In each story, the …

The award-wining collection Blue Talk and Love tells the stories of girls and women of color navigating the moods and mazes of urban daily life. Set in various enclaves of New York City — including the middle-class Hamilton Heights section of Harlem, the black queer social world of the West Village, the Spanish-speaking borderland between Harlem and Washington Heights, and historic Tin Pan Alley — the collection uses magic realism, historical fiction, satire and more to highlight young black women's inner lives.

The storylines range widely: a big-bodied teenage girl from Harlem discovers her sexuality in the midst of racial tensions at her Upper East Side school; four young women from Newark, New Jersey, are charged with assaulting the man who threatens to rape them; a pair of conjoined black female twins born into slavery, make their fame as stage performers in the Big City. In each story, the characters push past what is expected of them, learning to celebrate their voices and their lives.

1 edition

Stephanie Jane reviewed Blue Talk and Love by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

Amazing short story collection

5 stars

I chose Blue Talk And Love almost entirely because of Mirlande Jean-Gilles's stunning cover image. The black woman proudly facing out shows exactly what this story collection is about. Fourteen short stories portray lives of black women in America, primarily contemporary New York. I didn't know what to expect having not read any of Sullivan's work before, and so was pleasantly surprised by the book. Her grasp of character is brilliant and the women fairly leapt off the page into my imagination. Some of the speech took a bit of working out, but the atmosphere of each story came across convincingly and I loved picturing the locations and people in my mind.

Sullivan includes a wide sweep of women within her tales and I was particularly taken by the historical story of conjoined twins We-Chrissie and We-Millie. Their struggle from slavery through freak-shows and a kind of fame, to …

I chose Blue Talk And Love almost entirely because of Mirlande Jean-Gilles's stunning cover image. The black woman proudly facing out shows exactly what this story collection is about. Fourteen short stories portray lives of black women in America, primarily contemporary New York. I didn't know what to expect having not read any of Sullivan's work before, and so was pleasantly surprised by the book. Her grasp of character is brilliant and the women fairly leapt off the page into my imagination. Some of the speech took a bit of working out, but the atmosphere of each story came across convincingly and I loved picturing the locations and people in my mind.

Sullivan includes a wide sweep of women within her tales and I was particularly taken by the historical story of conjoined twins We-Chrissie and We-Millie. Their struggle from slavery through freak-shows and a kind of fame, to dwindling popularity and uncertainty about their future is sensitively written and emotionally moving. I also liked the quiet desperation of Dominique and her family in the story Adale. Driven out of their home by rising rents, pregnant Dominique, her mother and her son are facing a new life away from the support of their friends and church group. Told against the backdrop of news reports of the 2005 tsunami, I liked how Sullivan contrasted that swift devastation of towns and lives with the slower but equally relentless destruction and rebuilding of Dominique's district as new money moves in. Dominique's donation to the Somalian victims of the tsunami - an imaginable horror - was emotional. Other stories tackle issues of weight and body image, gender identity and artistic integrity - as I type this I've just remembered the story Ruidos which could make a thoughtful bridge from the Kazuo Ishiguro story collection Nocturnes.

I hope Blue Talk And Love won't be sidelined as being of minority interest. The first stories feature lesbian characters and I think Riverdale Avenue is an LGBT publisher, but this is not just a book of stories about gender identity or about race, but about women. It is an interesting collection that I think will resound with women of any colour worldwide.