Such Great Heights
There is this kind of hit
or miss deal that happens sometimes with book covers. This was a definite miss.
Not only was this cover one I’d seen far too many times before, it was just all
wrong. Adding sepia tone to a picture doesn’t make the guys in the cover men of
color. It’s just a sepia pic of two guys. Off white doesn’t mean black. This
image is about five steps up from Al Jolson and about a hundred steps back from
everything else that truly matters.
There is something quite
often more judgmental in me than I want it to be when I see a cover. Sometimes
the covers make me ridiculously optimistic about the content; sometimes they
are just so off putting that I can see nothing good coming from reading the
story. In this case the latter was the sentiment I carried with me as I started
this story.
Under normal circumstances
I’d give this one a pass, but the circumstances were far from normal. After
getting this as a free e-book I’d gotten an email from the author. Maybe it was
a generic – insert name here – email, but it was a nice gesture. His email
helped me ignore the cover, which I didn’t like before the content made it
clear “one of these things is not like the other.”
The story needed so much
better than the cover it received. But I went into it with the wrong frame of
mind. My city should have been a balm, but it wasn’t. New York is all I’ve ever
really known and Brooklyn is just a place I use to have nightmares about as a
child and the remnant of hostility is all that remains. Though I firmly believe
that gentrification has been trying to displace me for a very long time. I’ll
probably wind up in the South Bronx with my sisters, which it still more New
York than Brooklyn. I might even wind up in Queens like one of my daughters,
though that’s still a hell of a surprise, because I didn’t know people moved to
Queens. I thought they were mostly just born there. That aside, the city in this
story is not my New York. As a
multifaceted ever-changing city, the quality of unrecognizable shouldn’t
surprise me.
Still, this story felt
like the cusp of something—like the buildup to something that was left
dangling, a modifier unfulfilled. I counted the pages through the buildup and
felt the abruptness of the ending long before I reached it. I liked it for
where it was and couldn’t really like it for all those things left unexplored. But,
after a fashion, I really do get it. It’s just that where this story was headed
and where I thought it was going made the chasm in the middle feel almost as
bad as the cover.
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