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If Beale Street Could Talk (Film Discussion, Aug-Sep 2019)
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By Christopher · 4 posts · 20 views
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If Beale Street Could Talk (Book Discussion, Aug-Sep 2019)
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By Christopher · 25 posts · 28 views
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Friederike's 2019 Reading Plan
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By Friederike · 44 posts · 37 views
last updated Dec 31, 2019 12:49PM
What Members Thought
In 1972 New York City, a young black artist is falsely accused of rape and sent to jail. Narrated by his pregnant fiancé, this is a story of love and family struggling under the burden of racial injustice. Forty-five years later, it is tragic that, except for clothing styles and slang, this could have been set in the present. Having the young fiancé narrate sections of the novel where she was not present was jarring. This book felt like the story and the characters were secondary to the social a
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A beautiful lyrical novel set in 1970s Harlem about young lovers Fonny and Tish, who are separated when Fonny is falsely accused of a crime and imprisoned. The narrative looks back at Fonny and Tish's relationship as well as his time in prison and the attempts of Tish and her family to gain his freedom.
Baldwin writes so brilliantly and packs a world of emotion into a short novel. The injustice of society is apparent from the outset, as Tish scornfully highlights the self-fulfilling prophecy tha ...more
Baldwin writes so brilliantly and packs a world of emotion into a short novel. The injustice of society is apparent from the outset, as Tish scornfully highlights the self-fulfilling prophecy tha ...more
Having read The Fire Next Time, which I found to be a very powerful read, I was hoping for a similar experience when reading this book. Unfortunately, the slow pace in telling the story and the order of the storytelling itself weighed me down from fully enjoying what was happening to the characters. The book is about a man wrongly imprisoned and the effect that it has on his wife and family. The book has an important message, which I feel was diluted by the issues that I had raised previously.
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Everything I've seen about this book has praised it as a wonderful love story. It's true that the romance portions of this book are well written and moving, but it's hard to see this as a love story. It seems to me first and foremost a political novel. A black man is in prison (wrongfully) and it's about the effort to get him out. And, being that this is a novel about young black Americans on the wrong side of the law in the seventies, written by a black author with a particularly bleak view of
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Sep 08, 2013
Lise Petrauskas
marked it as on-hold
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
novels,
aint-that-america
