[[2024 Cafe Posts#Rose|Rose's Works - 2024]] It should not be shocking that someone working on a graduate degree in literature has always been a big reader. But, college and graduate school have a way of sort of beating that out of you because you just have to read what you’re told and so reading becomes a chore, it becomes work--even if you like your assigned readings. In the last couple of years, I’ve been working to reclaim my love of reading. It really started with *The Locked Tomb* series, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about; Tamsyn Muir is great, but she doesn’t need my good press at this point. But, since then, I’ve tried to make an effort to primarily focus on writers of color. Pursuing an English degree at a university where the English department has largely stagnated in the last several decades means I read a lot of old white men. And that limits perspective, limits your worldview. So, I’ve been trying to get out of that. And it’s been great! It really started with *Americanah* by Chimamanda Adichie, which was incredible! Probably top 5 of books I’ve ever read. And, she incidentally has a great TEDtalk on why it's so important to read and experience stories different from your own. But, that really leads me to the book I actually want to talk about: *When We Were Birds* by Ayanna Llyod Banwo. She is a Trinidadian writer and this is her first novel, so I’m going to be trying to keep my eye out for her next one (which she’s already working on).  *When We Were Birds* was so good. So good that I literally marked that I finished it and wrote a review on storygraph (goodreads founded by PoC and not flooded with white women) after finishing it. I stayed up later than I should’ve because I knew I was almost done and I had to see it through. It was one of those books. And it left such an impression on me that it was hard to sleep because I couldn't stop thinking about how good the book was! Like, wow! I'm trying to parse it exactly. It's not as if I'm an uncritical reader, but sometimes I don't think too heavily about a book. I read a couple of murder mysteries late last year, both of which were fine, but also very kind of fluff? And they frustrated me because I felt that the 'mystery', so to speak, was not reasonably solvable (also one had focus issues, in my mind). Simply put, I feel like a good mystery should allow the reader to piece it together themselves and solve the puzzle by the end of the book. The delicate balance being, of course, that it not be so predictable you can determine it right away. Maybe I'm not perceptive enough, but neither of these felt like that was possible based on how they were written and the solutions given. The one was more concerned with the love story that actually took center stage and the other felt like it jack-knifed around as far as the suspects and motives were concerned. That's not to say I didn't enjoy them; I did! But I largely finished reading them and said "okay, that was fun" and that was it. This is the first time I've devoted some serious thought to them since finishing them. Meanwhile, as I already said, I can’t stop thinking about *When We Were Birds.* This book counts as what you’d call literary fiction and if that scares you off, bear with me (🐻). The novel focuses on two characters, jumping between Yejide and Darwin. Both are living around Port Angeles, a large, fictional city in Trinidad. Darwin comes from the countryside, having been raised by his single mother. Yejide is the inheritor of a family duty to the dead, something that is established early on, though the nature of this connection doesn’t become clear until late in the novel.  There are some parallels worth considering between these protagonists and I think that’s one of the things that I can’t stop turning over in my head. By the time that the novel begins, we see both characters struggling with their relationship with their mothers: for Yejide, it’s that she never felt any love from her mother, a cold woman who was unwilling to accept the legacy she inherited; for Darwin, he is tired of watching his mother struggle with her disease and decides to get a job, a decision which alienates his mother as well as his religion. The reader watches as these characters deal with a sort of motherly alienation and begin to learn the reality of their new lives.  I won’t say too much about Darwin’s revelations, but suffice it to say that in the last third of the novel, things pick up as he learns the reality of his job at the enormous cemetery, Fidelis. It’s not long before this that Yejide is forced to accept her destiny and deal with the death of a mother for whom she has reasonably conflicted feelings. It’s also at this point that the two finally cross paths. This meeting is the sort of narrative turn that you know is coming but I think that the way it ends is ultimately satisfying. It's not shocking that this novel brings us that romance, but I will say that Banwo's writing of their first "date," if you will, is incredibly tender and evocative. And the ending was, at least for me, moving. I started tearing up reading one of Darwin's denouement chapters. Again, I don't want to say too much here because I think it's more fun and interesting to experience it for yourself, but let me say these last two things and then I'll leave you alone. The penultimate chapter is a Yejide perspective chapter and it's beautifully written and the final line sticks with me "She will her beloved alive, alive, alive." I read that and thought, "what a beautiful, powerful final line" and then I flipped the page to find another chapter! I was, momentarily, gutted that she didn't let it end there. But momentarily, because, the actual final lines are the closing from a letter that Darwin writes to his mother. In it, he reassures her that he is always her son and even thinking about it make me want to cry. I'm not the child of a single mother, but my relationship with my mom has always been the most significant in my life, so relationships between mother and child strike me right in the heart. It is from that same heart that I ask you read this book.