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The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois Book Review

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers' debut certainly looks intimidating—my ebook copy is 1,664 pages long—but it is absolutely worth the read. A story of one girl's coming of age woven through with the stories of her ancestors, Jeffers creates a masterpiece generational story within these pages, one that will keep you engrossed until the very end. 

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a fiction writer, poet, and essayist. She is the author of five poetry volumes, the latest of which, The Age of Phillis, was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry, and has published writing in The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, and more. For her research on the eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley Peters—which inspired The Age of Phillis—Jeffers was elected into the American Antiquarian Society, a learned organization for the study of early American history, to which fourteen U.S. presidents have been elected. Jeffers is a critic at large for Kenyon Review and teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Oklahoma. 

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. 

People who know me know I love generational stories, and stories that move throughout great lengths of time and place. I didn't know before I started that The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois would fall into this category, so at first I was extremely overwhelmed by the book's length and structure. However, once I got deeper into the story, I was engrossed by Ailey's growth, the stories of the songs, and just how the novel would end. Generational stories are so fascinating to me because you truly have an opportunity to comment on not just family dynamics or social lives, but also the world as it evolves and changes. It is true that once you get to the end of the novel, you will think harder and much differently about what it means to be an American.

Ailey is the story's main focus, as we follow her life from childhood to adulthood, but the novel is woven through with other points of view, too. Not only does Ailey get to speak about her side of things, but her mother and sister Lydia also have shining, emotional moments in the narration. Their parts were probably some of my favorite, because we got to see how flawed it is to only have one side of the story. Ailey's and other female characters' parts are split up by songs, which are moments where Jeffers dives into the ancestors' stories. It was so fascinating to see how the ancestors' stories were woven through with Ailey's present day life, to understand her heritage before she did, and to feel their echoes throughout history. The way the past and the present stayed in constant dialogue with one another because of this organization was brilliant. 

Jeffers does a fantastic job varying the writing styles based on who is narrating the story. Ailey herself goes through multiple narration style transformations as she grows up—her childhood voice is childish, and very singular, and we get to watch her first-person voice evolve as she goes to college, falls in love, experiences grief and heartache, and eventually goes to get her master's and doctorate degrees. Some of the changes in her voice are subtle (especially as she gets older) but they are there, speaking to Jeffers' masterful ability to show rather than tell the type of character growth her main character is experiencing. I also appreciated that I could tell the difference between Ailey's voice and Lydia's and Belle's voices, versus the voice used in the third-person songs; with such a hefty book, it's so helpful to feel the different styles of writing because they help signal which narration and which part of the story we're diving back into. 

I personally probably would have enjoyed this novel more had I read it physically, so just make sure if you're going to tackle this one that it's in the format that works best for you! It's absolutely worth the read, and you'll have to let me know what you think when you finish. 

*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*

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