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3.94 AVERAGE
3.94 AVERAGE
The book focuses more about the developing relationship between the protagonist and a Detroit boy and less about the struggles of adapting in a new environment.
A powerful story about a girl from Haiti coming to live with family in Detroit. The story hits hard topics such as immigration separation, struggles of living in and surviving a new city, and police brutality. The ending is heartbreaking but powerful.
Well done but even more tragic than I was expecting. Would like to know more about Ibi Zoboi's reason for writing this and her own story.
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
Seventeen-year-old Fabiola Toussaint is moving to Detroit where her mother's sister Matant Jo François lives with her three daughters Chantal and the twins Primadonna (Donna) and Princess (Pri).
Fabiola was born in America but her mother was not. Fabiola passes through Customs but to her horror, her mother Valerie Toussaint is detained. What can Fabiola do? If her Manman is sent back to Port-au-Prince, Fabiola is certain she cannot handle being alone with relatives she doesn't really know in a country she doesn't really know either. She has spent her entire life in Haiti. They had hoped to be starting a new life with more opportunities. Her mother had made certain Fabiola could speak English by enrolling her in a Haitian private school which taught their subjects in English to prepare her daughter for this emigration. She has already discovered American English reflects a culture she barely understands from the confusions at the airports she passed through. It is even more confusing in her relatives' decaying neighborhood, where poverty and violence reign. She thinks this impoverished place is the same as some streets in her Haitian neighborhood! Perplexed, she looks at the street signs which had given her hope at first. Her aunt's house is on the crossroads of American Street and Joy Road. American Joy. Hmmm.
Still numb with shock, Fabiola moves in with her aunt Matant Jo and her cousins. Their house is cluttered, it is clear no one cooks much, her aunt stays in her bedroom, and her cousins Donna and Pri are wild childs, getting into fights at their private high school and seemingly members of their own gang which they call "The Three Bees" - Beauty (Donna), Brains (Chantal) and Brawn (Pri). Worse, Donna's boyfriend Drayton is a drug dealer who beats Donna up all of the time - not that Donna feels it until the next day as she usually is drunk on their dates.
Fabiola sets up her religious Vodou shrine to pray to her spirit guides on a shelf. it consists of a statue to La Sainte Vierge, two tea candles, a beaded asson hours a small brass bell, a white enamel mug, a cross and a piece of white fabric. She will definitely need to pray for her new American family as well as the safety of her mother in the detention facility in New Jersey, wherever that is. Papa Legba, the lwa of crossroads, will certainly open the doors to let her mother cross to this side.
Then, a handsome boy, Kasim Anderson, smiles at Fabiola at her new school. Things are looking up. Maybe. He seems to be a relative of Dray Carter, and they seem to be working for or connected to the local drug lord, Q. Surprisingly, a police detective, Shawna Stevens, pulls Fabiola aside with a proposition. Will Fabiola call the police if she hears where Dray is throwing a drug party?
Fabiola really misses her Manman.
The story moves along very quickly, but it manages to logically include a lot of issues regarding rundown urban neighborhoods without the writing feeling awkward. However, the story seems breezy compared to [b:The Hate U Give|32075671|The Hate U Give|Angie Thomas|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1476284759s/32075671.jpg|49638190], although 'American Street' covers some of the same issues. I think, though, this novel is for younger readers than 'The Hate U Give', and it does not address racism directly. The urban blight of the neighborhood where the action happens is observed without explanations, but it is clear joblessness has given drug dealers their power over the people who live in this neighborhood.
I liked this novel. I think mature high school students will enjoy this novel best.
Fabiola was born in America but her mother was not. Fabiola passes through Customs but to her horror, her mother Valerie Toussaint is detained. What can Fabiola do? If her Manman is sent back to Port-au-Prince, Fabiola is certain she cannot handle being alone with relatives she doesn't really know in a country she doesn't really know either. She has spent her entire life in Haiti. They had hoped to be starting a new life with more opportunities. Her mother had made certain Fabiola could speak English by enrolling her in a Haitian private school which taught their subjects in English to prepare her daughter for this emigration. She has already discovered American English reflects a culture she barely understands from the confusions at the airports she passed through. It is even more confusing in her relatives' decaying neighborhood, where poverty and violence reign. She thinks this impoverished place is the same as some streets in her Haitian neighborhood! Perplexed, she looks at the street signs which had given her hope at first. Her aunt's house is on the crossroads of American Street and Joy Road. American Joy. Hmmm.
Still numb with shock, Fabiola moves in with her aunt Matant Jo and her cousins. Their house is cluttered, it is clear no one cooks much, her aunt stays in her bedroom, and her cousins Donna and Pri are wild childs, getting into fights at their private high school and seemingly members of their own gang which they call "The Three Bees" - Beauty (Donna), Brains (Chantal) and Brawn (Pri). Worse, Donna's boyfriend Drayton is a drug dealer who beats Donna up all of the time - not that Donna feels it until the next day as she usually is drunk on their dates.
Fabiola sets up her religious Vodou shrine to pray to her spirit guides on a shelf. it consists of a statue to La Sainte Vierge, two tea candles, a beaded asson hours a small brass bell, a white enamel mug, a cross and a piece of white fabric. She will definitely need to pray for her new American family as well as the safety of her mother in the detention facility in New Jersey, wherever that is. Papa Legba, the lwa of crossroads, will certainly open the doors to let her mother cross to this side.
Then, a handsome boy, Kasim Anderson, smiles at Fabiola at her new school. Things are looking up. Maybe. He seems to be a relative of Dray Carter, and they seem to be working for or connected to the local drug lord, Q. Surprisingly, a police detective, Shawna Stevens, pulls Fabiola aside with a proposition. Will Fabiola call the police if she hears where Dray is throwing a drug party?
Fabiola really misses her Manman.
The story moves along very quickly, but it manages to logically include a lot of issues regarding rundown urban neighborhoods without the writing feeling awkward. However, the story seems breezy compared to [b:The Hate U Give|32075671|The Hate U Give|Angie Thomas|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1476284759s/32075671.jpg|49638190], although 'American Street' covers some of the same issues. I think, though, this novel is for younger readers than 'The Hate U Give', and it does not address racism directly. The urban blight of the neighborhood where the action happens is observed without explanations, but it is clear joblessness has given drug dealers their power over the people who live in this neighborhood.
I liked this novel. I think mature high school students will enjoy this novel best.
Synopsis
Seventeen year-old Fabiola and her mother came to America to live with her cousins and aunt, to start over with the “good life” in America. Yet, as Fabiola crosses into customs, her mother is left on the other side, detained and not able to enter. Fabiola is forced to go on without her, to begin to live the “good life” without her mother. Yet this “good life” isn’t anything like Fabiola imagined. Fabiola must learn to navigate life in Detroit as she seeks help from her spirit guides to make her family whole again.
Audience and Privilege
While I’m rating American Street as a four-star book, this is another book, much like The Hate U Give that ultimately wasn’t for me. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it—I absolutely did and plan to recommend it within my friend-group widely. That’s also not the say the author doesn’t want white readers, but simply to say that at the end of the day, if I hadn’t enjoyed this book, it’s not my place to review it poorly. The experiences of Fabiola and her cousins in American Street are representative of real lives—people who live lives I cannot imagine and who make choices I have never had to make, largely because of the color of my skin and the place of privilege I occupy. If I didn’t like the book because I didn’t relate to it or understand it, then that is reflective of me and not the book.
(FTR--I do appreciate the irony in my reviewing books written by authors of color while simultaneously questioning white authors who write about the experiences of people of color as with Trell and Killers of the Flower Moon. There are enough white authors trying to speak for people of color that I never want to take someone else’s place to speak their story. Even in reviewing books, there are inherent biases at play—even as I try to be aware of my privilege and how it can drive my reactions to books, no one is completely aware of or able to separate themselves from their privilege.)
I did not, however, want to skip reviewing this book. While I don’t have a large audience, I do want my blog to serve as a place to find books you might otherwise not read. I try to read widely and have pretty diverse taste (so long as its well-written!) so it is my hope that there is a little something from everyone here.
With that in mind, I decided to go ahead and review American Street so that perhaps, Reader, you might pick it up when you would have otherwise missed it. I wouldn’t have picked it up myself if Jennifer Latham, author of Dreamland Burning, hadn’t recommended it during her author chat for the MMD book club at the beginning of the summer.
Naiveté
One of the things that made American Street so powerful for me was the author’s use of a limited point of view to tell a far wider-reaching story than the reader realizes at the beginning. The entire story is told from the point of view of Fabiola, a recent immigrant from Haiti whose mom is detained when they try to return to the United States where Fabiola was born seventeen years before. Because there are some ways in which it is obvious—clothing, makeup, culture—that Fabiola is Naïve—with a capital “N”—it is easy to see only those little things and miss the forest for the trees. Because the reader’s view is limited by Fabiola’s ability to experience and grasp what is going on around her, the events of the end of the book are all the more shocking. Fabiola didn’t see them coming and so, to a large extent, I didn’t either. I’m fairly good at picking up surprising twists or at least knowing one is coming, and I did not see where this book was going to go until I was almost on top of it. And then I desperately wanted to be wrong. Zoboi’s use of point of view here was masterful and not something that is this well done very often.
Characters and Magical Realism
To make sense of the word around her, Fabiola connects the people around her to her lwas, or Haitian spirit guides. For some characters, this makes them more sympathetic and adds a layer of richness to the character development—her cousin Donna is Ezili-Danto—the lover and the beauty who is also the warrior. Two sides, one person. For others, like Bad Leg, the homeless man across the street, seeing him as the lwa Papa Legba imbues the book with a layer of magical realism that then opens the door to events that are not entirely realistic, yet still fit within the larger scheme and story of the book.
Immigrant Experience
Much of the charm of American Street comes down to Fabiola’s experiences as being out of her culture. While the slips are frustrating to Fabiola, they are charming to the reader and serve to remind readers how young she is--both literally and in experience. Fabiola, while naïve, has been well-loved by her mother and well-cared-for. Her cousin’s home—literally on the corner of American and Joy streets—was the Promised Land where everything would better. So when Fabiola is dropped into this intersection, without her mother, into a foreignness she did not expect, she has to remind herself to be happy, to smile because this is the “good life.”
My heart aches for her in these moments. I know what it is to have small disappointments result from my expectations not meeting reality, but the magnitude for Fabiola is staggering. For Fabiola, it is another earthquake—the foundations cracked, the earth roiling under her feet. Yet even in Haiti during the earthquake, she had friends and neighbors, her mother. Here she has no one. Fabiola has to navigate not only what it means to become an American but also how to life a life different and more disappointing than the one she imagined for herself when she and her mother planned to come to America, all without seeming ungrateful to her cousins and aunt who barely have enough to provide for another mouth.
“YA”
Like The Hate U Give or, to a slightly lesser extent, When Dimple Met Rishi, this is a YA book that skews towards older/heavier themes. Some of the common elements of YA are here—Fabiola is besotted with Kasim, a teenage boy equally smitten with her. He “invades” her every thought and takes her on some dates that teenage boys would do well to take notes on. The limited sex scenes are just that—very limited—and tastefully vague. I don’t think there’s much to worry about there.
My labeling the book as being more of an older YA book, however, stems from the larger themes. Here as in Sing, Unburied, Sing, there are characters selling drugs, yet as with Ward’s characters, these characters are nuanced, with good reasons to be making these choices (even if they are, ultimately, the wrong choices). There is also violence throughout the book, as the neighborhood is rough and Fabiola’s cousin Donna is in a volatile, abusive relationship. These themes and violence would make me hesitate to recommend the book to anyone under sixteen, and even then, if a teenager were reading this, this would be a book to read and unpack together.
Summary
This is a book I highly recommend, particularly for people who are trying to read more diversely. Fabiola is lovely and it is difficult for the reader not to feel deeply empathetic for her and want the best for her. The events of the book are rough, but frankly, so is life for many teenagers living in Detroit in 2017. The book is well-written, though the dialogue is accurate for how teenagers would speak (so the vocabulary would be NSFW).
Notes
Published: February 14, 2017 by Balzer + Bray (@balzerandbray), an imprint of HarperCollins (@harpercollinsus)
Author: Ibi Zoboi (@ibizoboi)
Date read: September 3, 2017
Rating: 4 ¼ Stars
Enjoyed this review? Find more at http://lisaannreads.wpengine.com
Seventeen year-old Fabiola and her mother came to America to live with her cousins and aunt, to start over with the “good life” in America. Yet, as Fabiola crosses into customs, her mother is left on the other side, detained and not able to enter. Fabiola is forced to go on without her, to begin to live the “good life” without her mother. Yet this “good life” isn’t anything like Fabiola imagined. Fabiola must learn to navigate life in Detroit as she seeks help from her spirit guides to make her family whole again.
Audience and Privilege
While I’m rating American Street as a four-star book, this is another book, much like The Hate U Give that ultimately wasn’t for me. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it—I absolutely did and plan to recommend it within my friend-group widely. That’s also not the say the author doesn’t want white readers, but simply to say that at the end of the day, if I hadn’t enjoyed this book, it’s not my place to review it poorly. The experiences of Fabiola and her cousins in American Street are representative of real lives—people who live lives I cannot imagine and who make choices I have never had to make, largely because of the color of my skin and the place of privilege I occupy. If I didn’t like the book because I didn’t relate to it or understand it, then that is reflective of me and not the book.
(FTR--I do appreciate the irony in my reviewing books written by authors of color while simultaneously questioning white authors who write about the experiences of people of color as with Trell and Killers of the Flower Moon. There are enough white authors trying to speak for people of color that I never want to take someone else’s place to speak their story. Even in reviewing books, there are inherent biases at play—even as I try to be aware of my privilege and how it can drive my reactions to books, no one is completely aware of or able to separate themselves from their privilege.)
I did not, however, want to skip reviewing this book. While I don’t have a large audience, I do want my blog to serve as a place to find books you might otherwise not read. I try to read widely and have pretty diverse taste (so long as its well-written!) so it is my hope that there is a little something from everyone here.
With that in mind, I decided to go ahead and review American Street so that perhaps, Reader, you might pick it up when you would have otherwise missed it. I wouldn’t have picked it up myself if Jennifer Latham, author of Dreamland Burning, hadn’t recommended it during her author chat for the MMD book club at the beginning of the summer.
Naiveté
One of the things that made American Street so powerful for me was the author’s use of a limited point of view to tell a far wider-reaching story than the reader realizes at the beginning. The entire story is told from the point of view of Fabiola, a recent immigrant from Haiti whose mom is detained when they try to return to the United States where Fabiola was born seventeen years before. Because there are some ways in which it is obvious—clothing, makeup, culture—that Fabiola is Naïve—with a capital “N”—it is easy to see only those little things and miss the forest for the trees. Because the reader’s view is limited by Fabiola’s ability to experience and grasp what is going on around her, the events of the end of the book are all the more shocking. Fabiola didn’t see them coming and so, to a large extent, I didn’t either. I’m fairly good at picking up surprising twists or at least knowing one is coming, and I did not see where this book was going to go until I was almost on top of it. And then I desperately wanted to be wrong. Zoboi’s use of point of view here was masterful and not something that is this well done very often.
Characters and Magical Realism
To make sense of the word around her, Fabiola connects the people around her to her lwas, or Haitian spirit guides. For some characters, this makes them more sympathetic and adds a layer of richness to the character development—her cousin Donna is Ezili-Danto—the lover and the beauty who is also the warrior. Two sides, one person. For others, like Bad Leg, the homeless man across the street, seeing him as the lwa Papa Legba imbues the book with a layer of magical realism that then opens the door to events that are not entirely realistic, yet still fit within the larger scheme and story of the book.
Immigrant Experience
Much of the charm of American Street comes down to Fabiola’s experiences as being out of her culture. While the slips are frustrating to Fabiola, they are charming to the reader and serve to remind readers how young she is--both literally and in experience. Fabiola, while naïve, has been well-loved by her mother and well-cared-for. Her cousin’s home—literally on the corner of American and Joy streets—was the Promised Land where everything would better. So when Fabiola is dropped into this intersection, without her mother, into a foreignness she did not expect, she has to remind herself to be happy, to smile because this is the “good life.”
My heart aches for her in these moments. I know what it is to have small disappointments result from my expectations not meeting reality, but the magnitude for Fabiola is staggering. For Fabiola, it is another earthquake—the foundations cracked, the earth roiling under her feet. Yet even in Haiti during the earthquake, she had friends and neighbors, her mother. Here she has no one. Fabiola has to navigate not only what it means to become an American but also how to life a life different and more disappointing than the one she imagined for herself when she and her mother planned to come to America, all without seeming ungrateful to her cousins and aunt who barely have enough to provide for another mouth.
“YA”
Like The Hate U Give or, to a slightly lesser extent, When Dimple Met Rishi, this is a YA book that skews towards older/heavier themes. Some of the common elements of YA are here—Fabiola is besotted with Kasim, a teenage boy equally smitten with her. He “invades” her every thought and takes her on some dates that teenage boys would do well to take notes on. The limited sex scenes are just that—very limited—and tastefully vague. I don’t think there’s much to worry about there.
My labeling the book as being more of an older YA book, however, stems from the larger themes. Here as in Sing, Unburied, Sing, there are characters selling drugs, yet as with Ward’s characters, these characters are nuanced, with good reasons to be making these choices (even if they are, ultimately, the wrong choices). There is also violence throughout the book, as the neighborhood is rough and Fabiola’s cousin Donna is in a volatile, abusive relationship. These themes and violence would make me hesitate to recommend the book to anyone under sixteen, and even then, if a teenager were reading this, this would be a book to read and unpack together.
Summary
This is a book I highly recommend, particularly for people who are trying to read more diversely. Fabiola is lovely and it is difficult for the reader not to feel deeply empathetic for her and want the best for her. The events of the book are rough, but frankly, so is life for many teenagers living in Detroit in 2017. The book is well-written, though the dialogue is accurate for how teenagers would speak (so the vocabulary would be NSFW).
Notes
Published: February 14, 2017 by Balzer + Bray (@balzerandbray), an imprint of HarperCollins (@harpercollinsus)
Author: Ibi Zoboi (@ibizoboi)
Date read: September 3, 2017
Rating: 4 ¼ Stars
Enjoyed this review? Find more at http://lisaannreads.wpengine.com
This had the potential to be such a good story, but the main conflict got lost among all the girl drama, boy drama, and shady business drama. The main conflict about getting Fabiola's mother out of the detention center is built entirely on details told to the reader, not shown. Fabiola and her mother have a deep, sisterly connection (or so we're told), but she is not even a character in the book! This really makes it difficult to connect with Fabiola's willingness to do anything (including listening to a man she believes is Papa Legba rather than her own family members) to get her back.
The whole story is way unbalanced, with most of the story revolving around the drama of their neighborhood in Detroit and a fake-feeling love story, rather than Fabiola's adjustments to America or pain at losing her mother. The beginning felt like starting 10 minutes into a movie, and the ending felt rushed and incomplete.
That being said, I did finish this in 3 days, so I obviously didn't totally dislike this book. I just hate wasted potential!
The whole story is way unbalanced, with most of the story revolving around the drama of their neighborhood in Detroit and a fake-feeling love story, rather than Fabiola's adjustments to America or pain at losing her mother. The beginning felt like starting 10 minutes into a movie, and the ending felt rushed and incomplete.
That being said, I did finish this in 3 days, so I obviously didn't totally dislike this book. I just hate wasted potential!
Spoiler
abuse: physical & mental
swearing
some vague sexual content
LGBTQ
violence
check reviews
This book was great. It took some time for me to finish it but overrall, it was really good. I could relate to Fabiola a little because I myself have been in that position before. I would recommend this book