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4.34 AVERAGE
4.34 AVERAGE
dark
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
emotional
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
emotional
reflective
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
James Baldwin’s only book of short fiction, Going to Meet the Man, contains eight stories about race, adolescence, family, violence, love, and more in the first half of the 20th century. His characters face the social distresses of time, place, and their own dysfunctional families. Young boys and men appear often in the collection either as protagonists or focal points of a story as part of the collection’s main theme of psychological development. The answers to why some of his adult characters feel and act the way they do can be found in the lives of his younger characters. An undercurrent of violence flows through every story. Whether a child fears his father’s punishment or explicit acts are perpetrated, the feeling that something terrible is about to happen bubbles tensely under the surface and on the page. Baldwin writes deeply and poetically about the inner lives of all his characters, but that's the main way we learn about the ones who don’t quite know how to interact with the outside world yet and struggle to process the interactions they do have. I wondered if this in any way mirror’s Baldwin’s own journey to understand himself and his relationship to the outside world. This understanding of the self is at the center of the book. Each character is trying to come face-to-face with who they are or are becoming, to cut through all the fog and conflicting narratives of who the rest of the world is telling them they are in order to know their own hearts no matter the darkness within.
challenging
dark
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
dark
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
N/A
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
James Baldwin is a king. That's all. The way he gets into the mind of a white police officer and displays the horrors of that time specifically is haunting and thought-provoking.
TW: lynching, racism
TW: lynching, racism
challenging
dark
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
The first couple of stories were pretty slow and I had trouble connecting with the religious themes. The other stories were quite different, with complex and conflicted characters. Really happy to have gotten such a wide sampling of Baldwin's work as I had only read two of his novels before.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Hate crime, Racial slurs, Racism, Sexism, Police brutality, Murder