Long Division

Fascinating time travel novel with great characters, use of place and language, and mind bending meta elements. Dark and sad and funny and hopeful all at once, and full of characters I'd love to meet. Some parts were a bit confusing to me (what was up with the cat??) but if you can handle that I highly recommend it.

This one was interesting, and I'm still processing it. I'd have to read parts of this again to fully understand it, which is fun. I knew this was going to be a good time because A) I loved Laymon's memoir, so I knew this would be well-written and B) the book has a physical structure unlike that which I've seen before: two parts that start from opposite ends of the book (as in, an identical front and back cover, and the second part of the book is upside-down from the first, starting from the back cover which could be the front cover, starting the pages over at 1).

The books are somehow the continuation of the same story, but I'd have to read it again to see how all the puzzle pieces match up. Beyond the interesting narrative structure, the writing style of this book is a GD delight. The main character, a teenager named City, is hilarious, but also complex and heavy with the realities of growing up black in our society. His character feels incredibly true, while the other characters feel magical and unreal in a way that fits perfectly with the story.

This book makes us ask big, hard questions of ourselves and the world we live in, but is fun and fantastical at the same time. Absolutely recommend for a simultaneously fun and challenging read.