Reviews with content warning for Murder - Last Summer on State Street

This short book brought back so many memories for me. In the early 2000s our church youth group went to Chicago from Waco, Tx. We spent a week volunteering at a soup kitchen, the food pantries and Holy Angels school, right by the projects. One of the things that struck me was like how, in the book, she mentions there were no trees. The buildings looked just like you might imagine in the book. And we were told how they were destroying buildings and moving people away. It was shocking to me then, but reading this book from a personal perspective made me really visualize it all happening.

I got to join a chat with her through KellyHooks.readsbooks and she mentioned how she wanted the cover to look like summer sunsets and the colors girls wear in the summer (with the trees removed - again bc there were no trees). This cover will always remind me of that.

Even though it’s short, it packs a lot of punch. It just took me right back.

Chapter 1
“It seemed random, the Chicago Housing Authority’s choice of which buildings to destroy first; some blocks—like mine—were completely intact, others a mess.”

“But since our families had all migrated from small towns in Mississippi, bringing the same superstitions, games, and cheers with them on those Illinois Central trains, we had these common things in our DNA; that’s what glued us together for a time.”

Chapter 2
“At school, we had to be kind and respectful to each other, because Ms. Pierce made us act like a loving family, but back at the building, we pretended we couldn’t stand one another; none of us really knew what to do with the actual affection that we felt. It seemed like a flaw to have these emotions. We didn’t know then that the practice of burying emotions created adults who’d struggle to build meaningful relationships; some of us would eventually completely forget how to access true feelings.”

“but that summer, I’d often choose fun over right.”

“All of those Tonyas were attractive, the last thing you wanted to be if you were a girl living in the hood.”

Chapter 3
“I’d learn that so many things that I thought were solid and structured in my life could be broken down, bit by bit, just like those buildings.”

Chapter 11
“He soaked up the conflict, let it rush through his veins.”

Chapter 35
“We will meet people; they will transform us. We will see things that will age us. That summer when I am twelve and Meechie is sixteen, we will lose so many things, so many people. Among the loss will be the high-rises that our family called home for three generations, but the high-rises aren’t the most important thing we’ll lose; that summer, we will lose ourselves.”

Content Warnings