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What is motherhood in the midst of uncertainty, buried trauma, and an unraveling America? What it’s always been—a love song.
Our narrator is a gifted photographer, an uncertain wife, an infertile mother, a biracial woman in an unraveling America. As she grapples with a lifetime of ambivalence about motherhood, yet another act of police brutality makes headlines, and this time the victim is Noah, a boy in her photography class. Unmoored by the grief of a recent devastating miscarriage and Noah’s fight for his life, she worries she can no longer chase the hope of having a child, no longer wants to bring a Black body into the world. Yet her husband Asher—contributing white, Jewish genes alongside her Black-Japanese ones for any potential child—is just as desperate to keep trying.
Throwing herself into a new documentary on motherhood, and making secret visits to Noah in the hospital, this when she learns she is, impossibly, pregnant. As the future shifts once again, she must decide yet again what she dares hope for the shape of her future to be. Fearless, timely, blazing with voice, Blue Hour is a fragmentary novel with unignorable storytelling power.
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Creators
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Release date
April 4, 2023 -
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781593767501
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781593767501
- File size: 2696 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Kirkus
February 15, 2023
A biracial woman contemplates motherhood, grief, and being Black in America. The unnamed narrator of Harrison's debut novel is a 34-year-old Black Japanese photographer and teacher who is struggling with infertility and an increasingly complicated relationship to motherhood. Slipping back and forth in time, the slim novel follows the narrator's stream-of-consciousness thoughts and meandering memories. The narrator blames herself for a life-altering family tragedy and struggles to believe she deserves good things, including, and perhaps most especially, a child. Between attending therapy sessions and police brutality protests, the narrator remembers falling in love with her husband, Asher Fromm, her recent miscarriage, the agony of her young adulthood, and teaching her photography students, including a talented Black student named Noah. When Noah is shot by police while reaching for a candy bar in his back pocket, the narrator begins to question whether she wants to bring a baby into this world--into a country that murders Black children--despite it being all her husband (who is White and Jewish) wants. Her once-staunch stance against motherhood and marriage changed when she met him, but in the face of her all-consuming grief she asks: "Could my malfunctioning body and the reality of this American nightmare change it back?" As the couple figures out how to move forward after loss, the narrator finds herself secretly visiting Noah in the hospital, working on a new documentary project, and, against all odds, pregnant again. Harrison's writing is unflinching throughout, but the depictions of miscarriage and infertility--and their effect on a marriage--are particularly haunting: "The light is perfect, and you are far away in some honest, uncharted place. I don't know where, only that I can't get there. Not even with directions, a compass, or you holding my hand." In the vein of Jenny Offill and Raven Leilani, Harrison's debut offers an intimate slice-of-life portrait with no easy questions or answers. A poetic novel that dances on the edge of hope and despair.COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Publisher's Weekly
February 20, 2023
Harrison’s debut chronicles a mixed race woman’s harrowing journey through contemporary American motherhood. The unnamed narrator, who is Black and Japanese, deals with a litany of tragedies. When she’s 22, most of her family is killed in a car accident. She pursues a career in photography, and at 28 she marries Asher, a Jewish man who runs a clothing boutique. Though Asher wants to start a family, two miscarriages sour the narrator on the idea of having children. Her grief is exacerbated when Noah, a student in her photography class, is shot by the police, and she feels responsible because the shooting happened while her class was meant to be in session—she’d canceled it for a fertility appointment. As she surreptitiously visits Noah in the hospital, she discovers she’s pregnant, and her fear of having another miscarriage blends with a dueling worry of bringing a child into a world rife with police violence. In lyrical language, Harrison skillfully explores the complex tensions that gnaw at the expectant mother (“We hold our breath. All the way to the first, second, and third sonograms; all the way through sixteen weeks, we hold our breath”) and offers an intimate view of the couple’s pain. This signals the arrival of a brave new writer.
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Formats
- Kindle Book
- OverDrive Read
- EPUB ebook
subjects
Languages
- English
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