Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. Whether or not you believe in ghosts, prepare for Thandi's voice to follow you from room to room long after you put this book away.Ī compelling exploration of race, migration, and womanhood in contemporary America.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. “My theory is that loneliness creates the feeling of haunting,” Thandi confesses during a rough patch. This is a big, brainy drama told by a fearless, funny young woman-part philosophy, part sociology, and part ghost story. Clemmons manages to write with economy without ever making her book feel small, and with humor and frankness, so the novel is not overly steeped in grief.

Written in compact episodes that collage autofiction with '90s rap lyrics, hand-drawn graphs, blog entries, and photographs, the novel pushes restlessly against its own boundaries-like Thandi herself. In the process, she produces an honest, propulsive account of grief, interrogating the relationship among death, sex, motherhood, and culture. Caught between two continents-between American blackness and South Africa's legacy of apartheid-she sets out to discover what makes life worth living after tragedy hits. In this inventive debut novel, a young woman writes her way out of grief.Īs a “strange in-betweener” with two mixed-race parents-a South African mother and an American father-Thandi must navigate the majority-white suburbs of Philadelphia, where she's 'often mistaken for Hispanic or Asian, sometimes Jewish.' 'But you're not, like, a real black person,' she's told as a young student, confirming her feeling that she was 'never fully accepted by any race.' When her mother dies of cancer, Thandi must come to terms with the loss-including her strongest link to family in Johannesburg.

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