The names of all the flowers / a memoir by Melissa Valentine.
Material type: TextPublisher: New York, NY : The Feminist Press, 2020Copyright date: ©2020Edition: First Feminist Press editionDescription: 307 pages ; 21 cmContent type:- text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9781936932856
- 1936932857
Item type | Home library | Collection | Call number | Materials specified | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Adult Book | Dr. James Carlson Library | Biography | VALENTIN M. V158 | Available | 33111009744992 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
Set in rapidly gentrifying 1990s Oakland, this memoir--"poignant, painful, and gorgeous" (Alicia Garza)--explores siblinghood, adolescence, and grief in a family shattered by loss.
Melissa and her older brother Junior grow up running around the disparate neighborhoods of 1990s Oakland, two of six children to a white Quaker father and a black Southern mother. But as Junior approaches adolescence, a bullying incident and later a violent attack in school leave him searching for power and a sense of self in all the wrong places; he develops a hard front and falls into drug dealing. Right before Junior's twentieth birthday, the family is torn apart when he is murdered as a result of gun violence.
The Names of All the Flowers connects one tragic death to a collective grief for all black people who die too young. A lyrical recounting of a life lost, Melissa Valentine's debut memoir is an intimate portrait of a family fractured by the school-to-prison pipeline and an enduring love letter to an adored older brother. It is a call for justice amid endless cycles of violence, grief, and trauma, declaring: "We are all witness and therefore no one is spared from this loss."
"Valentine's heartfelt memoir of losing her brother expresses the grief of being a black woman left behind when a black man dies to gun violence, and the specific condition of growing up mixed race in Oakland. As such, it's a portrait of a place, a person who died too young, the systems that led to that death, and the keen insights of the author herself. Lyrical and smart, with appropriate undercurrents of rage." --Emily Raboteau, author of Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora
"This debut memoir by Melissa Valentine recounts how the author lost her older brother Junior-first to a system that criminalizes black boys and men, and then to an act of gun violence in 1990s Oakland"-- Provided by publisher.