Disgruntled

December 1, 2014
An air of dissatisfaction pervades this unsentimental portrait of one girl’s rocky journey to adulthood, in an impressive debut novel from Solomon (following her story collection Get Down). Growing up in West Philadelphia in the late ’80s, eight-year-old Kenya Curtis is old enough to notice that her family is different from her classmates’. Her charismatic father gives speeches on philosophy, race, and religion at weekly meetings of a motley group called the Seven Days, but Kenya never falls under his spell as some of the Seven Days do. After a traumatic event, Kenya’s world shifts: she moves from a small house in the city to a big one in the suburbs, and from public to private school. The perpetual outsider, Kenya searches for her place in society as she bounces between schools, friend groups, and family members. Her incisive commentary is both arresting and painful, despite her ongoing dissatisfaction. This is a bildungsroman with a kick.

December 1, 2014
In this witty take on 1980s Philadelphia, a young girl comes of age and learns to navigate love, loss, school and family. Kenya, whom we meet at age 7 and watch graduate from high school into womanhood, is the daughter of Afrocentric parents. Their politics and yearly celebration of Kwanzaa, which entails "sporting an orange, yellow and brown dashiki and a forehead-straining vertical braided hairstyle," make Kenya a social pariah even at her all-black school. In Kenya, Solomon has crafted a character of irrepressible verve and voice who carries us joyously through the novel-even after she witnesses her parents' breakup, when her father is imprisoned for injuring her mother with a gun. With the separation, Kenya is propelled from her safe black Philly world into the white world of an elite private school-the very world her father fled, traumatized and bitter. Here, she becomes a master of code-switching to fit in, all while knowing that her classmates will never truly accept her. After a chance meeting with a black boy from her old neighborhood turns into a failed love affair, Kenya seeks comfort in a visit to her father, newly released from prison. The scenes with Kenya's father, who's enjoying a bigamous life with two new wives and two new sets of kids, are razor-sharp on the contradictions of identity-here, for example, we see Kenya's father, a staunch activist for African-American rights, unable to make the link to respect women's rights. Kenya has a palpable need for her father to become a solid, guiding force as she steps into womanhood, but he can't do it. And when her stepfather loses all her mother's money, Kenya's future college education doesn't quite go as planned. In this debut novel, Solomon (Get Down, 2008) examines the confusing moments on the verge of adulthood within the ever shifting makeup of family and society. Blackness, feminism and the loss of virginity have never been analyzed by a more astute and witty main character.

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February 15, 2015

This much-anticipated first novel from Solomon (following her highly regarded collection, Get Down) is the coming-of-age story of a young African American woman going through a childhood and adolescence in 1980s Philadelphia that are more difficult than most. Straddling two diverse worlds, with two very different (and difficult) parents, is Kenya's burden. She knows her family is unusual; most kids don't call their dad Baba, celebrate Kwanzaa, shun pork, or have a group of semimilitant activists called the Seven Days meeting in their home. Kenya's father, Johnbrown, is not so much a civil rights activist as a self-styled philosopher and author. He's obsessed with past martyrs, especially a black servant who gruesomely murdered the mistress of Frank Lloyd Wright and several others in 1914 Wisconsin. When Kenya's parents split up, her life changes as she and her mother, a librarian, move to a safer part of the city and Kenya is accepted into an expensive all-girls school. VERDICT Will Kenya flourish at her new school, go to college, and become upwardly mobile, as her hardworking but dissatisfied mother wants? Where does Kenya belong? How will she find her own path, and her own identity, not one defined by her past and her parents? Solomon addresses all these questions with consummate grace.--Shaunna E. Hunter, Hampden-Sydney Coll. Lib., VA

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Starred review from October 15, 2014
Kenya is teased mercilessly by her Philadelphia grade-school classmates for her Kwanzaa-celebrating family's odd waysand they don't know the half of it. Her radical father, Johnbrown (he added brown in racial solidarity), went to prep school and got thrown out of Cornell. Now, in 1984, he preaches black anarchy as the volatile leader of the Seven Days, a group he and Kenya's mother, Sheila, who grew up in the projects and who supports her family as a librarian, has pulled together, based, in part, on the black vigilantes in Toni Morrison's novel, Song of Solomon. The oddest thing about charismatic Johnbrown's idiosyncratic belief system is his spooky fascination with Frank Lloyd Wright's black butler, who burned down the architect's Wisconsin home and murdered Wright's mistress and her children. Preternaturally observant and mordantly funny, Kenya is a hypnotic narrator coping valiantly with an increasingly bewildering life. When Johnbrown and Sheila split apart with ballistic force, each establishes a household problematic for Kenya in unnerving ways as she finds herself navigating the chill of a private, primarily white high school and dreaming of college. Solomon's cultural references resound, her dialogue stings, and the intricate and surprising relationships she choreographs are saturated with racial, sexual, and political quandaries of intimate and epochal repercussions. A deft, knowing, bold, and witty debut.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)