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A review by reggiereads
Insurrections: Stories by Rion Amilcar Scott
5.0
Cross River is home to the United States' only successful slave rebellion, and from the first story in this collection, Good Times, all the way to the finale, Three Insurrections, you are captivated.
What stood out to me most about this collection is how inventive it was. Scott successfully plays by his own rules (I'm sure he had plenty of fun doing so!). Like many contemporary authors, he chooses to bypass the use of quotation marks when his characters speak, but that is the smallest part of his inventiveness. Stories like "Party Animal: The Strange and Savage Case of a Once Erudite & Eloquent Young Man" use HILARIOUS footnotes that enhance the "study" we read. You even have interviews from a rapper named L'Ouverture that we end up reading in the another hilarious story called "Razor Bumps."
If you are a fan of the TV show Atlanta, then I can easily see you liking this collection for it's dialogue and the way it amplifies the Black experience through its very wide range of topics. Though this collection features protagonists that tend to be men (mostly) and women who are either older or younger than the Earns, Paper Bois, and Darius' of the world.
I look forward to more of you visiting Cross River in 2019, and I see why the PEN/Robert Bingham Prize was awarded to Mr. Scott in 2017. I have high expectations going into his Sophomore collection, The World Doesn't Require You, which is being brought to us by Liveright in August of 2019, and I am confident those expectations will be reached, if not surpassed.
What stood out to me most about this collection is how inventive it was. Scott successfully plays by his own rules (I'm sure he had plenty of fun doing so!). Like many contemporary authors, he chooses to bypass the use of quotation marks when his characters speak, but that is the smallest part of his inventiveness. Stories like "Party Animal: The Strange and Savage Case of a Once Erudite & Eloquent Young Man" use HILARIOUS footnotes that enhance the "study" we read. You even have interviews from a rapper named L'Ouverture that we end up reading in the another hilarious story called "Razor Bumps."
If you are a fan of the TV show Atlanta, then I can easily see you liking this collection for it's dialogue and the way it amplifies the Black experience through its very wide range of topics. Though this collection features protagonists that tend to be men (mostly) and women who are either older or younger than the Earns, Paper Bois, and Darius' of the world.
I look forward to more of you visiting Cross River in 2019, and I see why the PEN/Robert Bingham Prize was awarded to Mr. Scott in 2017. I have high expectations going into his Sophomore collection, The World Doesn't Require You, which is being brought to us by Liveright in August of 2019, and I am confident those expectations will be reached, if not surpassed.