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The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois : An Oprah's Book Club Novel

Jeffers, Honorée Fanonne, 1967- (Author). Cloud. (Added Author).

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMESDeep SouthHomegoing; Sing, Unburied, Sing; and The Water Dancer'that chronicles the journey of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade through the Civil War to our own tumultuous era. The great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called 'Double Consciousness,' a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois's words all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans'the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother Pearl, the descendant of enslaved Georgians and tenant farmers'Ailey carries Du Bois's Problem on her shoulders.Ailey is reared in the north in the City but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother's family has lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa in bondage. From an early age, Ailey fights a battle for belonging that's made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma, as well as the whispers of women'her mother, Belle, her sister, Lydia, and a maternal line reaching back two centuries'that urge Ailey to succeed in their stead.To come to terms with her own identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her family's past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of ancestors'Indigenous, Black, and white'in the deep South. In doing so Ailey must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of oppression and resistance, bondage and independence, cruelty and resilience that is the story'and the song'of America itself.

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  • ISBN: 9780062942968
  • Physical Description 1 online resource 816 pages
  • Publisher [Place of publication not identified] : Harper, 2021.

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Electronic book.
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Electronic reproduction. [S.l.] Harper 2021 Available via World Wide Web.
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Syndetic Solutions - Publishers Weekly Review for ISBN Number 9780062942968
The Love Songs of W. E. B. du Bois : A Novel
The Love Songs of W. E. B. du Bois : A Novel
by Jeffers, Honorée Fanonne
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Publishers Weekly Review

The Love Songs of W. E. B. du Bois : A Novel

Publishers Weekly


(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Poet Jeffers (The Age of Phyllis) debuts with a staggering and ambitious saga exploring African American history. Ailey Pearl Garfield, the youngest daughter of Geoff Garfield, a light-skinned Washington, D.C., physician, and Belle Driskell Garfield, a Southern school teacher, reckons with ancestral trauma while growing up in the 1980s and '90s. Throughout, historical sketches (or "songs") link Ailey to her ancestors: Creeks, enslaved Africans, and early Scot slave owners. Ailey follows in the footsteps of her parents, attending the southern HBCU where they met and married as undergraduates before moving north to the "City," where Geoff attended medical school at Mecca University (a thinly veiled Howard). W.E.B. Du Bois's theories emerge in epigraphs throughout and are sagaciously reflected in the plot, as the accounts of Ailey's college life correspond to the "talented tenth." Later, tragedy unfolds as Lydia, Ailey's oldest sister who is haunted by childhood sexual abuse, succumbs to crack addiction. The multigenerational story bursts open when Ailey unearths some unknown family history during her graduate studies, as well as secrets of the Black female founder of her family's alma mater. Themes of family, class, higher education, feminism, and colorism yield many rich layers. Readers will be floored. Agent: Sarah Burns, the Gernert Company. (July)

Syndetic Solutions - Library Journal Review for ISBN Number 9780062942968
The Love Songs of W. E. B. du Bois : A Novel
The Love Songs of W. E. B. du Bois : A Novel
by Jeffers, Honorée Fanonne
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Library Journal Review

The Love Songs of W. E. B. du Bois : A Novel

Library Journal


(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

DEBUT Ailey, the central character of this multigenerational saga from Jeffers (a National Book Award finalist in 2020 for her poetry collection The Age of Phillis), is the youngest daughter of an upwardly mobile Black family. Though they live in a Northern city, the family has roots in rural Georgia, where Ailey, her mother, and sometimes her siblings spend the summers. The account of Ailey's coming-of-age and self-actualization is interspersed with interludes called "songs" that tell the complex family history, beginning with Ailey's indigenous Creek ancestors, the colonization of the land by white settlers, and the legacy of slavery. We also take detours focusing on Ailey's mother, Belle, and her oldest sister, Lydia. Over the centuries, members of the family, with African, Creek, and white ancestry, experience generational trauma resulting from slavery and sexual abuse; they are occasionally visited at crucial times by dreams or visions of ancestors. The book's length and scope might feel daunting, but Ailey is an appealing protagonist, and the patient reader will be rewarded. Jeffers has created an extensive world and a cast of memorable characters, not the least of whom is Ailey's great-great-uncle Root, a retired professor and Du Bois devotee. VERDICT A worthy addition to the growing corpus of Black generational novels, and an essentially American story.--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis

Syndetic Solutions - Kirkus Review for ISBN Number 9780062942968
The Love Songs of W. E. B. du Bois : A Novel
The Love Songs of W. E. B. du Bois : A Novel
by Jeffers, Honorée Fanonne
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Kirkus Review

The Love Songs of W. E. B. du Bois : A Novel

Kirkus Reviews


Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A sprawling, ambitious debut novel that is as impassioned in promoting Black women's autonomy as it is insistent on acknowledging our common humanity. Ailey Pearl Garfield, the protagonist of this epochal saga, is a compelling mélange of intellectual curiosity, scathing observation, and volatile emotion. Though her grandmother may have preferred that she join the parade of medical doctors in their family, Ailey is destined to become a historian. Her journey toward that goal, fraught with heartache, upheaval, and conflict from her childhood through adolescence and collegiate years, is interwoven with the results of her inquiry into her family history. That history is deeply rooted in the Georgia town of Chicasetta, where Ailey's Black ancestors were enslaved and exploited by a "White Man with Strange Eyes" named Samuel Pinchard, who not only brutalized and demeaned his slaves, but also haphazardly procreated with them over the decades before the Civil War. The "songs" interspersed throughout the book, chronicling in vivid, sometimes-graphic detail the antebellum lives of Ailey's forbears, are bridges linking Ailey's own coming-of-age travails in what is referred to only as the City. Precocious, outspoken, and sensitive, Ailey often tests the patience of the grown-ups in her life, especially her parents, Geoff and Belle, whose own arduous passage to love and marriage through the 1950s and '60s is among the many subplots crowding this capacious, time-traversing narrative. The story always swerves back to Chicasetta, where Ailey spends her summers, and her encounters with friends and relations, the most notable of whom is her beloved Uncle Root, a retired professor at a historically Black college where he'd first made the acquaintance of the novel's eponymous scholar/activist. In her first novel, Jeffers, a celebrated poet, manages the difficult task of blending the sweeping with the intimate, and, as in most big books, she risks stress-testing some of her own narrative threads. Still, the sturdiest of those threads can throb with haunting poignancy, as in the account of Ailey's promising-but-troubled sister, Lydia, which can stand alone as a masterful deconstruction of addiction's origins and outcomes. If this isn't the Great American Novel, it's a mighty attempt at achieving one. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Syndetic Solutions - BookList Review for ISBN Number 9780062942968
The Love Songs of W. E. B. du Bois : A Novel
The Love Songs of W. E. B. du Bois : A Novel
by Jeffers, Honorée Fanonne
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BookList Review

The Love Songs of W. E. B. du Bois : A Novel

Booklist


From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

Poet Jeffers reinvigorates the multigenerational saga in her first novel, an audacious, mellifluous love song to an African American family. In alternate chapters, Jeffers traces the coming of age of her contemporary heroine, Ailey, juxtaposed against the tales of multiracial ancestors whose sufferings and blood infuse the rich Georgia soil. Jeffers' lyrical cadences shimmer across the historical chapters, echoing biblical genealogies in connecting Ailey to her roots. Her story is inseparable from those who went before, and like her beloved Uncle Root, she is destined to preserve their history. Some stories she would rather forget: the sexual abuse that will haunt Ailey and her sisters, as it did their foremothers; the indelible yet often denied connection between white masters and African slaves, resulting in family members who "pass" for white, and "color struck" Negro clubs and sororities. Yet the strength of Ailey's family bonds enable her to overcome monstrous racism and sexism to become her community's prophet. "And the Word was knowledge. And the knowledge was a sound within the flesh, which may have been the Good Lord, or may have been dead ones in Africa talking across an ocean, or our people here on this side." Incandescent and not to be missed.