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casskrug 's review for:
Great Expectations
by Vinson Cunningham
thank you to hogarth for sending me a copy of this book!
great expectations is an autofictional account of a young black father working on a senator’s presidential campaign, presumably mirroring cunningham’s experience working on obama’s first presidential campaign. it grapples with race, religion, and fatherhood. throughout the novel, the differences in the lived experiences of david and the people he encounters while working on the campaign are continuously highlighted - he dropped out of college after learning he was going to become a father and was working as a tutor before he joined the campaign. as a fundraiser, he’s rubbing elbows with some incredibly wealthy, powerful people. david stood out as a refreshing source of innocence in the political world, which made it easy to root for him as he navigated unfamiliar situations.
this is a novel made up of every day moments. one of the most memorable scenes to me was david and his fellow staffers sitting in a dive bar watching basketball and befriending a young worker. cunningham really successfully evokes a feeling of time and place within the novel. the country’s spirit of hopefulness laced with skepticism at this turning point in US history is keenly observed through david’s interactions with people in the different states that he gets to travel to. we also get a lot of vivid descriptions of the church culture that david has been so heavily involved in throughout his life. a lot of the religious references went over my head but i appreciated the parallels between the institutions of religion and politics. i felt like the exploration of david’s experience with fatherhood was quite subtle and wished it had been more overt at times, since i don’t think the perspective of fatherhood is explored nearly as much as motherhood is in contemporary lit fic. quite a promising debut!
great expectations is an autofictional account of a young black father working on a senator’s presidential campaign, presumably mirroring cunningham’s experience working on obama’s first presidential campaign. it grapples with race, religion, and fatherhood. throughout the novel, the differences in the lived experiences of david and the people he encounters while working on the campaign are continuously highlighted - he dropped out of college after learning he was going to become a father and was working as a tutor before he joined the campaign. as a fundraiser, he’s rubbing elbows with some incredibly wealthy, powerful people. david stood out as a refreshing source of innocence in the political world, which made it easy to root for him as he navigated unfamiliar situations.
this is a novel made up of every day moments. one of the most memorable scenes to me was david and his fellow staffers sitting in a dive bar watching basketball and befriending a young worker. cunningham really successfully evokes a feeling of time and place within the novel. the country’s spirit of hopefulness laced with skepticism at this turning point in US history is keenly observed through david’s interactions with people in the different states that he gets to travel to. we also get a lot of vivid descriptions of the church culture that david has been so heavily involved in throughout his life. a lot of the religious references went over my head but i appreciated the parallels between the institutions of religion and politics. i felt like the exploration of david’s experience with fatherhood was quite subtle and wished it had been more overt at times, since i don’t think the perspective of fatherhood is explored nearly as much as motherhood is in contemporary lit fic. quite a promising debut!