book summaries
The Untelling
In her latest novel, Tayari Jones paints a vivid, unforgettable portrait of a woman seeking to overcome the trauma of her past.
When Aria Jackson was nine, a car accident killed her father and baby sister, forever destroying her family’s secure middle-class life. The tragedy left her elegant mother, her rebellious sister, and Aria herself wounded by grief, rage, and guilt. Caught between her mother’s bitter dissatisfaction and her sister’s efforts to distance herself from the family altogether, Aria grew up alone, despite sharing a crowded home with her mother and sister.
At age twenty-five, Aria has created a meaningful life for herself, living in a not-quite gentrified inner-city neighborhood, teaching literacy to teenaged girls. For the first time in her life, she has both a best girlfriend in whom she can confide and a boyfriend who offers her love and respect.
When Aria discovers she may be pregnant, she is seduced by the promise of family, the lure of a normal life, and the dream of a fresh start. Then everything changes in ways she never anticipated. As she mediates between her past and her altered reality, she unearths secrets about family and friends and searches for the courage to divulge one heartbreaking revelation about herself.
Poignant, evocative, and luminously insightful, The Untelling speaks of the truths we hide even from ourselves, the circumstances that can either undermine or restore us, and the transformative power of examining all that we keep untold.
Leaving Atlanta
It was the end of summer, a summer during a two-year nightmare. African American children around Atlanta were vanishing, and twenty-nine would be murdered by the end of 1981.
Like all kids across the city, fifth-grade classmates Tasha Baxter, Rodney Green, and Octavia Harrison were discovering that back-to-school now meant special safety lessons, indoor recess, and being thrown into a world their parents couldn't comprehend, one in which the everyday challenges of growing up were coupled with constant fear—and the news of the murders of one's peers.
Tasha can't understand why she daily falls in and out of favor with her classmates—she isn't weird like Rodney or "too dark" and outspoken like Octavia. Then, through a sudden crush on a boy from the wrong side of town, she finds that words have the power to both heal and wound. (The next thought was that Tasha herself had brought it upon him with her hateful words. "I hope the man snatches you." And she meant it when she said it.)
For her classmate Rodney, almost everything feels wrong. Not tough enough to be loved by his strict father, too different to be accepted at school, he struggles to fit in somewhere. How far will he go to escape his bleak inner landscape? (Nothing you know is in the direction you're heading. Home is the other way.) And Rodney's "almost friend" Octavia, the loner the kids call "the Watusi," who lives near the projects, will discover that she, too, has something left to lose. (I cried because it seemed like everything good in the world was locked in a box. "Mama, let me stay.")
Movingly detailed and quietly heartbreaking, Leaving Atlanta shimmers with the piercing, ineffable quality of childhood. It is the hurts and little wins we all went through, the slow and all-too-sudden changes, and the forces that swept us into adulthood and forever shaped our lives.