Book Review: Dear Martin by Nic Stone - Entrepreneur Generations

Nic Stone's Dear Martin kept coming up on my Amazon recommendations list, but it was Lemony Snicket's recommendation in this article that really made me want to read it. I loved his description of the book's "zaggy sentences," a description that I'm uncertain what exactly it means but I loved it anyway.

It turns out he's right, if "zaggy" means what I think it might -- full of energy and lyricism. And even though I didn't get the pleasure of seeing the sentences on the page, I instead had the immense pleasure of listening to The Wire's Dion Graham read the text on Audible, and his vocalization of the protagonist, Justyce. In addition to straight-ahead prose, there are also chapters written in movie-like dialogue, as well as transcripts of news programs and the novel's titular framing device, letters to Dr. Martin Luther King. The extremely likable Justyce, in an attempt to understand the racially-charged world and his place in it, writes letters to Dr. King,which respond to the events that are happening to him.

Author Nic Stone.

Angie Thomas, author of the terrific The Hate U Give (my review here), has a quote on the cover of Dear Martin, and that makes sense: both novels deal with Black teenagers who attend mostly white private schools, and have to deal with small-minded prejudice of their white peers. In both novels, there is at least one white peer who is "woke" enough to get it, and, in both cases, there is an interracial romance between that white character and the black protagonist. More importantly, both novels center on issues of police brutality, which painful echoes of Trayvon Martin (in the opening scene, a police officer arrests the protagonist and mentions his hoodie), Tamir Rice, and, especially, Jordan Davis in Dear Martin.

Audible narrator Dion Graham.

While the broad-stroke similarities are there, Stone's novel exchanges Thomas's ambition for more focus (Dear Martin is less than half as long as The Hate U Give), and the resulting concentration on the likable Justyce makes us ache for him as he navigates his struggles with friendships, romantic entanglements, police, gangs, and grief. After reading the novel, I was surprised by photographs of Stone to discover she was a woman, for her capturing of Justyce's decidedly male voice (he appreciates the female body) was very authentic.

As for the novel itself, it is riveting and had me in tears quite a bit. Just a few months ago, I might have found the characterization of private school white teenagers to be a bit over-the-top, but the recent Halloween photographs mocking Freddie Gray by some of Baltimore's private school students demonstrates that the culture of privilege and racism is being propagated at these schools. Justyce tries to politely play along, even when there is a similar offensive Halloween stunt pulled, and not only does that come back to haunt him, all of the "wearing the mask" that Justyce must do eventually leads to a crisis of identity which feels totally genuine.

As the events of the novel move quickly from teenage relationship and identity crisis to tragedy and aftermath, Stone's spare and beautifully poetic words guide us to a conclusion that leaves us hopeful, despite it all. Whereas the plot might remind us of The Hate U Give, the style feels more like Walter Dean Myers, who loved to play around with genre. Stone's central motif of those letters to Dr. King worked for me, but it's the rest of the novel that I'll remember the most: the indelible voice of Justyce, the secondary characters, many of which have several layers and experience growth, and the raw, poetic words of Stone. By the end, she leaves me wanting more of these characters' lives, which is certainly a compliment.

Students, by the way, would love this book.

from Epiphany in Baltimore http://ift.tt/2naPqeD Book Review: Dear Martin by Nic Stone - Entrepreneur Generations

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