July 1, 2024
This novel from Josaphat (Dancing in the Baron's Shadow) won the 2023 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. In 1968, Haitian student Nettie Boileau lives in Oakland, CA, and becomes involved with the Black Panthers. She falls in love with one of their leaders and follows him to Chicago, where tragic events send her on the run, trying to save herself. Prepub Alert.
Copyright 2024 Library Journal
Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
October 14, 2024
In this vivacious drama from Josaphat (Dancing in the Baron’s Shadow), a Haitian-born woman weighs her plans for medical school against her growing involvement with the Black Panther Party in 1968 Oakland. As a premed student, Nettie Boileau volunteers at a hospital where she cares for people with sickle cell anemia, all of whom are Black. Her father was killed in Haiti while protesting the regime, and Nettie feels drawn to the Black Panthers after she’s introduced to the group by her best friend, Clia. After joining, Nettie falls in love with Melvin, a high-ranking party member, but is torn by a longing to fulfill her family’s wishes that she become a doctor, as well as by her desire for Clia. Josaphat fills the pages with vivid depictions of historical figures such as Stokely Carmichael, whose speech during a rally to free Huey Newton solidifies Nettie’s resolve to join the party, and explores the stark reality of what it was like for the Black Panthers to live under the constant threat of infiltration and violence from law enforcement. This dynamic and layered novel offers much to admire. Agent: Charlotte Gusay, Charlotte Gusay Literary.
November 1, 2024
A coming-of-age story mixes Black Panther Party ideals with besotted romance. It's 1968 and Nettie Boileau, the beautiful, orphaned daughter of a murdered Haitian doctor, arrives in Oakland, eager to assist with the first free medical outreach of the Black Panther Party. "If she couldn't do this, then what point was there in even living?" 20-year-old Nettie asks herself, in a story built of breathless interior rumination. Her best friend, Clia Brown, is crushing on her, but the novel's opening scene supplies Nettie with another reason to exist when she "lock[s] eyes" with the capable Panther Party captain, Melvin Mosley. He has been called in to dispatch the racists menacing the home of a boy with sickle cell anemia, but "what distressed her the most was how handsome he was." In due course, Melvin will give Nettie a gun and a pregnancy, two time-honored plot devices. Nettie takes both to the Midwest, following Melvin to his assignment to help open an Illinois chapter of the party. Young Nettie soaks up the rhetoric of Stokely Carmichael; she "caught those words like falling rain, swallowed them like holy water." But the high of revolutionary ardor precedes the low of Melvin's infidelities and the bitter winters of Chicago. Worse, the FBI moves in to shut down the Panthers, and it's Nettie and her body that pay the price. Josaphat, a Haitian-born writer living in South Florida, quotes Huey P. Newton, Fred Hampton, and James Baldwin to strong effect. Police are "pigs" here, and the Panthers' newspaper "was like a portal," reporting "who in the community had been imprisoned, whose death went uninvestigated, whose bail needed to be posted, and who needed legal assistance." The author is drawing clear parallels between police violence then and now. In her acknowledgements, Josaphat writes that she has "always been fascinated by the minds of radicals." Unhappily, her cliched prose makes a poor container for the history she reveres. A strong premise set amid the Black Panther Party falters in its execution.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
November 1, 2024
Nettie is a public-health student researching sickle cell anemia in turbulent 1968 Oakland. While visiting an afflicted teen, whose family is under attack from racist whites, she meets Melvin, a leader in the Black Panther Party, and her life is forever changed. Cool, confident, and charismatic, Melvin exemplifies the Panther values of community solidarity, scholarship, and total commitment to Black liberation, whatever the sacrifices. As she is drawn deeper into his world and to the leadership of Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, and Fred Hampton, Nettie explores her Haitian origins and the "unspoken violence of colonization" that colored her childhood. Panther life is full of contrasts, with ultra masculine men like Melvin "serving little children breakfast."" As a love token, he gives her a revolver. Gradually Nettie develops the skills required of a Panther sister, nursing a gunshot victim while under police fire, addressing rallies, and using her gun in self-defense. Alas, she must also cope with devastating loss. Richly detailing the sights, sounds, and urgency of late 1960s Oakland and Chicago, Josaphat offers a profoundly empathetic portrait of a controversial movement.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.