From Kiese Laymon, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Heavy,
comes a "funny, astute, searching" (The Wall Street Journal) debut
novel about Black teenagers that is a satirical exploration of
celebrity, authorship, violence, religion, and coming of age in
post-Katrina Mississippi. Written in a voice that's alternately
humorous, lacerating, and wise, Long Division features two
interwoven stories. In the first, it's 2013: after an on-stage
meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest,
fourteen-year-old Citoyen "City" Coldson becomes an overnight
YouTube celebrity. The next day, he's sent to stay with his
grandmother in the small coastal community of Melahatchie, where a
young girl named Baize Shephard has recently disappeared. Before
leaving, City is given a strange book without an author called Long
Division. He learns that one of the book's main characters is also
named City Coldson-but Long Division is set in 1985. This
1985-version of City, along with his friend and love interest,
Shalaya Crump, discovers a way to travel into the future, and
steals a laptop and cellphone from an orphaned teenage rapper
called...Baize Shephard. They ultimately take these items with them
all the way back to 1964, to help another time-traveler they meet
to protect his family from the Ku Klux Klan. City's two stories
ultimately converge in the work shed behind his grandmother's
house, where he discovers the key to Baize's disappearance.
Brilliantly "skewering the disingenuous masquerade of institutional
racism" (Publishers Weekly), this dreamlike "smart, funny, and
sharp" (Jesmyn Ward), novel shows the work that young Black
Americans must do, while living under the shadow of a history "that
they only gropingly understand and must try to fill in for
themselves" (The Wall Street Journal).
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