This is an absolutely awesome book, and I found it totally by accident.

I was reading about how the Apple TV+ series, Central Park, had been nominated for an NAACP Image Award. I had never heard of the Image Awards, but figured looking into it would be a great way to find out about quality books & media that might be marginalized out of mainstream coverage.

I put a few recent winners on my reading list, and Long Division was the first one I opened, and holy cow. Long Division is a super entertaining and deeply interesting book, and one I highly recommend.

The protagonist (and narrator) of this book is a black fourth grade boy who lives in Mississippi. I’ve never been to Mississippi, I barely remember the fourth grade, and I am not black. So the newness of the child’s experience pulled me in immediately. On top of the narrator having a life experience so different than my own, the fact that the narrator is a fourth grader allows the author to write with a casualness and a frankness that texts narrated by adults can’t reach.

That frankness gave the book an extremely intimate feeling. The author made me feel like I was right inside the brain of the protagonist, which is a rare and at times less-than-comfortable experience when reading something written by someone with such a radically different life experience.

As you’ll see from the quotes below, one thing the book wrestles with is the place of blackness in literature. The meta nature of this endeavor is complemented well by the meta nature of the narrative, itself - the book is mind-bending in more ways than one, and totally awesome on every page.

I really don’t want to ruin anything about the narrative, but I will say that the story quickly gets wild, and stays wild for the whole book.

Not only do startling and interesting things happen throughout, but the book is written in such a way that previous, seemingly innocuous plot points come back around to enhance the story’s eeriness. Frankly, I’d probably need to read it again (at least once) in order to really get everything the author is doing. I’m sure I will.

I highly recommend everyone give it a read!

Favorite Quotes:

“the Bible was better than those other spinach-colored Classic books that spent most of their time flossing with long sentences about pastures and fake sunsets and white dudes named Spencer. I didn’t hate on spinach, fake sunsets, or white dudes named Spencer, but you could just tell that whoever wrote the sentences in those books never imagined they’d be read by Grandma, Uncle Relle, LaVander Peeler, my cousins, or anyone I’d ever met.”

“English teachers like Ms. Shivers were always talking about “the reader.” Whoever “the reader” was, it never seemed like she could be like me.”

“Treat it like it never happened, you hear me? You are a smart child, an educated young man. You try to act grown in front of them cameras? Well, grown Black folks forget what they need to forget. That’s what grown Black folks do.”

“Everybody I knew, at one point or another, had called someone [the n-word], but I never heard the “er” when we said it to each other. It was just something that all of us said. We didn’t mean it to hurt each other and we didn’t mean it to make someone feel lucky. It was like the only word that meant lucky, cool, and cursed at the same time.”