Jam on the Vine

Starred review from November 3, 2014
This wonderful debut novel takes the early 20th century and brings it to life, both in the South and in the Midwest. Ivoe Williams is a brilliant young woman who grows up in Texas, the child of emancipated slaves, and despite the obstacles she faces, manages to get a degree in journalism in Austin. But no newspapers will hire her because she is an African-American woman. Her frustration with the Jim Crow South causes her to uproot and move to Kansas City, where she and her lover, Ona, start a newspaper, the first female-run African-American newspaper, called Jam! On the Vine. She uses this platform to examine segregation and the American prison system of the day, sometimes at great personal risk. Barnett doesn’t shy from exploring the queer community of the time, “othering” her protagonist even further, while the experiences of Ivoe’s family add a wonderfully
vibrant, fully realized vision of the shadowy corners of America’s history. Agent: Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents.

April 1, 2015

In 1919 Kansas City, MO, Ivoe and Ona found the first female-run black newspaper in the country and enter a relationship against a backdrop of lynchings and race riots. (LJ 12/14; see Q&A with Barnett at ow.ly/KrZbq.)

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 15, 2015
An impassioned historical novel chronicles the early-20th-century resurgence of African-American activism through the life of a poor Texas girl who channels a lifelong love of newsprint into a groundbreaking journalism career. Barnett, who has edited such anthologies as Off the Record: Conversations with African American and Brazilian Women Musicians (2014), makes her fiction debut with this coming-of-age saga, set at the hinge of the 19th and 20th centuries, about Ivoe Williams, a bright, avid daughter of a Muslim cook and a metalworker struggling to make ends meet in post-Reconstruction central Texas. Despite her bleak segregated environment, Ivoe grows up infatuated with the written word, most especially with the immediacy and color of newspapers she finds and, at least once, steals from her mother's white employer. Barnett excels here at what for most writers is a difficult task: evoking what it feels like to grow into one's calling as a writer through psychological intimacy as much as immediate experiences. The book is equally attentive in conceiving those who are closest to Ivoe, including her parents and siblings and two women with whom she would become emotionally involved while attending college: Berdis, the mercurial, flamboyant piano prodigy, and Ona, the magnetic, empathetic instructor who falls in love with Ivoe and eventually helps establish their own newspaper in Kansas City. Barnett's book is clearly inspired by the lives of crusading black journalists such as Ida B. Wells who inspired their communities to fight Jim Crow customs and legally sanctioned lynching. Yet most of those insurgent moments are crowded-jammed, if you will-toward the novel's end. One is left wanting less of a young black woman's rite of passage in a hostile environment, experiences amply represented in literature, and far more of Ivoe's journalistic accomplishments, about which there has been relatively little in American fiction. Now that we've seen how Ivoe Williams came to be, we'd like to see much more of the great things she was able to do with her craft. Maybe Barnett can oblige us. She's got the talent to do so.

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January 1, 2015
In her first novel, Barnett skillfully plumbs historical accounts of black American life in the Jim Crow era and weaves them into an engaging and enlightening family saga. The story centers on Ivoe Williams, born in east Texas in 1888, a precocious young girl who becomes obsessed with reading as a means of escaping her seemingly hopeless life. Encouraged by her mentor, Ona, Ivoe earns a scholarship to Willetson Collegiate and Normal Institute in Austin, where she studies printing, typesetting, literature, and history. After graduation, Ivoe is prevented from following her dream of writing for a newspaper in both her hometown and Kansas City, where she is turned down repeatedly owing to her race and her gender. She is joined in Kansas City by Ona, her teacher- become-loverand together, in 1918, they found the first female-run African American newspaper, Jam! On the Vine, which shines light on black achievement as well as detailing the systemic economic oppression and brutality rooted in racism, which was so prevalent then, only one generation removed from slavery.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)