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Synopsis:
A poignant, personal reflection on basketball, talent and allegiance, and of course, LeBron James—from the author of the National Book Award finalist A Little Devil in America
While Hanif Abdurraqib is an acclaimed author, a gifted poet, and one of our culture’s most insightful critics, he is most of all, at heart, an Ohioan. Growing up in Columbus in the 1990s, Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron were forged, and countless others weren’t. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tensions between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with memoir. “Here is where I would like to tell you about the form on my father’s jumpshot,” Abdurraqib writes. “The truth, though, is that I saw my father shoot a basketball only one time.”
There’s Always This Year is a classic Abdurraqib triumph, brimming with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. It’s about basketball in the way They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us is about music and A Little Devil in America is about history—no matter the subject, Abdurraqib’s exquisite writing is always poetry, always profound, and always a clarion call to radically reimagine how we think about our culture, our country, and ourselves.
Review:
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, cultural observer, music lover, and die hard Ohioan. He grew up in Columbus when Lebron James was playing high school basketball in 100 miles away in Akron. He drove this distance to watch James play. He also drove 143 miles from Columbus and Cleveland to watch the Cleveland Cavaliers, with and without James. With a few exceptions, all of There’s Always This Year takes place within these miles, and Hanif Abdurraqib has not only written an ode to Ohio and Cleveland sports but a treatise on being an underdog and living a life of loss, frustration, and being underestimated.
Cleveland is his sports town, but Columbus is his hometown. Hanif grows up in Columbus, one year older than Lebron, going to parks and basketball courts throughout the city, not only to play but watch those players who are local legends, and even better than those playing in the NBA, destinies unfulfilled. His personal life is also on this same trajectory. He does not graduate high school and live a life that leads to fame and recognition, but in the end, it is the mentality of being the underdog, the grit from growing up rooting for sports teams that are not meant to do much of anything, that keeps his focus and striving for better.
Lebron James is the catalyst to the timeline of the book. He is the example of the King who has come to Cleveland to make the team better, to win championships. The hopes of him being their basketball savior is dashed when he announces in 2010 in an ESPN special called “The Decision”, his intentions to leave Ohio and win championships in Miami, which he does. Abdurraqib dedicates one of the four quarters of this book to Lebron leaving Cleveland, how the city reacted, and how much he enjoys the fallout for the Cavs the next year. The return of Lebron to Cleveland in 2014 is met with the landscape of a city and of a country that has changed. Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson by police in August. Tamir Rice was killed by police in November. These events and the protests and unrest that results, is something that deeply affects Abduraqib, makes him contemplate the way basketball can be an escape, but this is just a way that we hustle ourselves into living with the unthinkable happening around us.
There’s Always This Year is a deep meditation that made me think long after finishing a chapter or even a paragraph. I have walked around the house late at night thinking about how we hustle ourselves. What it means to be a person who lives and dies for a sports franchise that does not live up the hopes of the beginning of the year. How we always love the underdog until the underdog starts to win. How we are put into a system where everyone is essentially an underdog, and unless we come together in the face of adversity, like in the Nike promo that Lebron James did when returning to Cleveland, then we do not stand a chance. This is a book that I will return to at a future date. It is one of those books that impact you in a way that you cannot forget. I am positive that each time I read it, I will find new ways to look at the meanings and feelings behind every single word of There’s Always This Year.
I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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Review: The American Daughters by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
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Synopsis:
A gripping historical novel about a spirited young girl who joins a sisterhood of Black women working together to undermine the Confederates—from the award-winning author of We Cast a Shadow
The American Daughters follows Ady, a curious, sharp-witted girl who is enslaved alongside her mother, Sanite to a businessman in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Sanite and her mother Ady are an inseparable duo—taking walks along the river, working together in the fields and spending nights looking up at the stars, dreaming. Ady’s favorite pastime is listening to Sanite’s stories of her families’ origins, their fierce and rebellious nature, and the everlasting love that strengthens their bond.
When mother and daughter are separated, Ady is left hopeless and unmoored, until she stumbles into the Mockingbird Inn and meets Lenore, a free Black woman with whom she becomes fast friends. Lenore invites Ady to join a clandestine society of spies called The Daughters. With the courage instilled in her by Sanite—and help from these strong women—Ady learns how to choose herself. So begins her journey toward liberation and imagining a new future. The American Daughters is a novel of hope and triumph that reminds us what is possible when a community bands together to fight for their right to live free.
Review:
The American Daughters, the second novel and third book by Maurice Carlos Ruffin, is a historical novel about Ady, a slave girl, who lives in a New Orleans and eventually finds kindred spirits in the women who work at The Mockingbird, a club ran by a free woman, Lenore. Ady is introduced by Lenore to a group of women spies who do things to undermine and sabotage the confederacy. Their actions do not stop the confederacy and slave owners from punishing them, but the war that the women wage against the oppressive men and government is one that makes them feel vindicated. Their work is justified for their work, regardless of the consequences.
Ady (sort for Adebimpe) is an easy character to like and cheer for. She is intelligent, strong, and defiant in the face of ugliness and hatefulness. In books about slavery, readers are hard pressed to ever find any sort of compassion toward a slave owner, so it is easy to want Ady and to succeed in everything that she does, whether it be running away into the woods with her mother, Sanite, while as a little girl, or plotting with her spy friends to undermine the confederacy and her owner. We want her to be successful. The danger that she finds herself in does lead to parts of the novel where the tension increases, but most of the time, the things that she is doing feel like things that she should get away with. She is doing the right thing, even with the dangers that it brings.
Maurice Carlos Ruffin has written a novel that is more serious than most of his other stories, but slave stories come with a natural tone of seriousness. He does find the ability to add a bigger story to this novel, one that brings home the social commentary at the center of this book. There are a few parts written in the far future, from historians and family members generations removed, who are using the text of The American Daughters as the true records of what slavery is like. Ruffin is saying that at this moment, we are still close enough to American slavery that there is a strong narrative, but in one hundred and fifty years, the only record we might have left is the stories that have been passed along from the actual slaves themselves. The official narrative will eventually diminish the centuries of slavery in America into a footnote, so it is up to personal stories, memoirs and biographies, and even some fiction, to continue the true narrative of slavery in America. I would have liked more of these cuts to the future throughout the novel and how this story has turned into an important historical document, because this idea is subtle, and it takes the epilogue for this idea to really be solidified. The American Daughters is another great story by Maurice Carlos Ruffin, and even though it is a little more serious in tone than his previous works, his social commentary is just as strong.
I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.