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Loading... Coffee Will Make You Black: A Novel (1994)by April SinclairIt was a pretty fun read, about a young African American girl growing up on Chicago's Southside during the 60's. It wasn't great, and at times heavy handed, in discussing the narrator's family and their relationship to the civil rights and Black Power movements. However, lots of funny bits about growing up in the 60's, so I enjoyed it overall. ( ) between 1.5 and 2 stars. i wanted to like this, and i do for what she was trying to do. there is so much she wants to say here, and get across. the points she's making - about racism and gender and class and sexuality and homophobia and growing up and maybe even about religion - are important and good. but maybe she's trying to do too much. and her writing is not good. i mean, it's not terrible either, but it's just not good. there were some fun parts, though. i was interested to see how long the tone deaf "not all white people" retort has been in circulation. (sigh.) I struggled with what to write about this book because so many things were going on that I feel like I would need a flowchart to explain how everything was connected. So many things popped up while reading this book for me and I a lot of different memories running through my brain about my own family. I thought that this book by April Sinclair was brilliant. Overall, I loved this book. There were some minor issues that I had, but not enough to rate the book below five stars. I emphasized with the main character Jean (known as Stevie) throughout this entire book. Stevie wants to be part of the cool girls at her school. She is at times frustrated with her mother who she sees as having no friends and life and only seems to be around to make Stevie do chores and for her to talk "white". Stevie is doing a delicate balancing act of having friends and trying not to do or say anything to alienate them, while also trying to still be involved with things that she wants to. The other characters in the story, such as Stevie's father, and her brother's don't seem to be written as richly as Stevie, her mother, and her grandmother. Additionally, the book being broken up into parts showing Stevie at middle school and then high school and we get to see her becoming aware that she may not be like the other girls she has grown up with. Included with that we get to see her reactions to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in Chicago at the time was very informative. Seeing Stevie struggle to fit in with the cool group to having an epiphany that if her friends don't like that she may be a certain way, that they were not good friends after all was great to see. I thought that the writing was very crisp though at times it was odd to read Stevie's thoughts (written perfectly) but then trying to decipher what someone was saying since Ms. Sinclair wrote the words as they would sound if pronounced sometimes. The setting of Chicago in winter, summer, spring felt very real to me. You can tell that the author actually lived or at least visited this city since everything she wrote in the story rang true. I did not grow up in the 1960s in Chicago like the main character Stevie did. However, I did grow up with a close knit family that had some of the same discussions that Stevie's family did about race. I remember hearing about the paper bag test when I was growing up. And I totally eavesdropped all of the time and heard people discussing "good hair". I can also speak to the double-edged sword of being too light or too dark in the black community. Being too light was not great since you were accused of trying to look white, and being too dark was not great since you were told you were too black. The same issue would emerge if you talked correctly since you were told you were trying to sound "white" or putting on airs. I now want to read Ain't Gonna be the Same Fool Twice, the sequel to Coffee Will Make you Black in order to see what happened with Stevie. (I was provided with a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review) OKAY WOW This book was so good. It's a coming of age story from the point of a black girl in the 1960's. I was hooked from the very fist page at the line "Mama, are you a virgin?". The book covers everything from skin tone to sexuality to having "bad" hair. This is the best book I've read in a long time, and I highly recommend it to people of all ages. Coffee Will Make You Black is an engrossing, fun read about a Black girl growing up in the the 1960's and 1970's in Chicago. Smart and curious, Stevie, like most adolescents, is searching for her niche in school, family and in her community. I liked Stevie and could easily relate to her struggle to find her own authentic voice while desperately wanting to fit in. Due to this desperation, she often makes choices that do not always fit who she truly "is" around friendship, sexuality, school and Coffee Will Make You Black portrays this journey in a fresh and often funny manner. Some of my favorite parts were the relationship between Stevie, and her mother and grandmother; three generations of women who grew up female in very different times giving each other grief, support and love. I also thought that Ms Sinclair did an excellent job of portraying the politics of that time, how race and racism and civil rights impacted in a day to day way a community, school and Stevie's growing self. The only part that felt jarring is when Stevie began to explore her bisexuality. It felt suddenly dropped in from nowhere and didn't seem to fit the narrative. I was curious that Ms Sinclair chose to have Stevie crush out on an older, white woman but I did like how by deciding to explore her sexuality Stevie came closer to seeing what she really wanted in friendships and love. Thank you to NetGalley for allowing me to review this book for an honest opinion. I read the first chapter, in which the only thing discussed are comparative skin tones, and had to put it aside and read something else. Then, being stubborn, I picked it up again and bulled on through. Ok, first of all, I am almost never a fan of mainstream books narrated by pre-teens. (Genre books do this shockingly well, for reasons that people have written theses about.) But I barely made it past the opening "conflict," in which there is a terrible misunderstanding because the poor girl doesn't know what "virgin" means. It doesn't really get less cliched than that, ever. While having no plot as such beyond "twelve-year-old goes through junior high and high school" is fine for this sort of book, I suppose, it felt awfully formless to me. The latter half of the book is made up of random one-page scenes where someone says or does something stereotypical and the main character responds in a way that proves she's growing as a person. I mean, seriously, every single character is some kind of stereotype, from the bad girl best friend to the random jealous flaming gay guy on the street to the young black guy in the late sixties who gets political and the boyfriend who appears to be a standup guy until she tells him she doesn't want to sleep with him. I felt guilty about my initial reaction, but the longer I read the more justified I felt. This is not a good book, although it'd probably be perfect fodder for a sophomore high school class. I was really surprised that I (white male) enjoyed a book so much whose _target audience was definitely black women. There is no one single plot that carries the book. It is more of a vignette of events and episodes, both cultural and personal about a young black teen girl growing up in Chicago in the mid 60s. I couldn't help but empathize with Stevie, (the narrator), and worry about her, and love her. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature American literature in English American fiction in English 1900-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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