Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson
I picked this up because Hobson was on a panel at the Tucson Festival of Books for National Book Award finalists with another writer I really wanted to see. On that panel he talked about sometimes being asked if he thought his book might be appropriate for younger readers–and I can totally see why.
Narrated by a teenager (well, technically, by an adult recalling his teenage experience, but with almost no adult filter at all), it really does have that young adult feel even where the subject matter gets perhaps too dark for that audience.
There is racial identity (the teen, Sequoyah, is Native American), gender identity (although it is pretty pale–he wears eyeliner and at one point tenderly holds a pair of stockings), violent impulses, and suicide–but it all just felt kind of stagnant to me. It was more portrait than story. Yes, his foster sister Rosemary dies at the end (as we learn on page 1), but the book never really explores why, or what that does to Sequoyah. He ostensibly narrates from adulthood, but we don’t see any real part of that to understand what this experience did to him.
I’m struck by a structural comparison to Milkman, where the literal fact of the end of the period being described is related in the opening–but, in my view, to much greater effect.
The prose itself is very strong. It’s straightforward and simple and sometimes surprisingly direct. But ultimately I like a novel with more movement. (Not necessarily lots of events happening, but discernible development).
Amy P. Knight 