Hello my lovely readers! I'm really making headway on my 10 Books 10 Decades Challenge just before the year end. I only have two more books to read and I'll have completed it. This was my first James Baldwin read and wow...what a book. Let's get into it.
SYNOPSIS
Baldwin's classic novel opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin tells the story of the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Originally published in 1953, Baldwin said of his first novel, " Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else."
MY THOUGHTS
I'll be completely honest, I read the first chapter and had to listen to the rest of it on Libby. I don't know why, but I couldn't connect to it in its physical form. I also had to use Cliff Notes to help me understand what I'd read/listened to. I think I was just too distracted while reading!
Anyway, what a powerful book! Baldwin knew what he was doing as a writer and his debut novel shows it. It was beautiful, heartbreaking, and vulnerable. I'm not sure if a book can be "vulnerable" but that what I took away from it. All of these characters endure so much and had such brilliant yet tragic backgrounds.
What an important novel to cover coming-of-age, religion, the Great Migration, race, gender and sexuality. I feel so privileged to have read it.
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