I can see why people like it and I’m a big fan of reading for difference, so I stuck it through and I’m not mad that I read this. It was weird, the characters were unlikable, and the story took forever to go nowhere. But then the story hiccups and there’s something about a traveling ethnomusicologist, “witchy folk”, a crush on a mysterious older girl, a 40-foot metal pole with a bicycle seat on top that nobody seems to think is dangerous and ok, you know what? I just didn’t like this at all. when he’s left to care for his younger siblings while mom and dad work long hours. Hamilton is a good storyteller and you really are drawn into the Higgins’s daily lives, and I did start to see a bit of myself in M.C.
I can’t necessarily relate, but the premise is fascinating. and his family are essentially Black hillbillies being slowly pushed out of their mountain home by a mining company’s destructive acts. I always say that I read to experience lives thoroughly unlike my own and in that, this book satisfies. does most of the parenting for his gaggle of siblings despite having a whole live-in mom and dad, and a pile of mining trash looms over it all. As it is, the book takes us into the mountains somewhere in the Eastern USA to follow 13 year old M.C.’s 3-day journey from…kid to slightly older kid? Weird characters pop up and do weird things, poverty abounds, nobody goes to school, M.C. That, plus its inclusion on a lot of #blackboyjoylit lists made me expect this to be a very different middle grade coming-of-age tale than it is. I’d heard nothing but glowing reviews of this from folks who read it in school and loved it. I read this book because I felt like I was missing out on something.
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