A relatively short read that has a whole lot of heart and packs a real good punch. Alternating between timelines, the book follows 3 generations in a family: Sabe and Po’boy and CathyMarie as parents and grandparents, Iris and Aubrey as teen parents, and their child, Melody. The book might be short, but man… the content is so whole and elaborate and tugs so strongly on heart strings. The decisions we make when we’re young, we take them with us as time flies and flies and boy does time fly. What a wonderful read.

After Jamison left, I really did think I was going to die standing. No one had taught me this—how to get out of bed and keep moving. And for the few days afterward, each time I tried to, I stumbled, dizziness coming for me like a wave. The smell of her still so much a part of me that it hurt to inhale. No one had taught me how to eat. How to swallow. So I lay there—day moving into night into day, while in the halls, I could hear students doing what they needed to do.

Slowly, Jamison’s scent became my own funk. When I finally climbed out of bed, it wasn’t so much to live. It was to wash and eat, to call home and hear a voice. To hear someone on the other end of that line who loved me. ////

So a week later, when I saw him walking with his arm around a pretty Puerto Rican girl, I crept upstairs to my room, faked the flu, and stayed in bed for days and days. Other boys followed and I learned quickly not to love them, to love the feeling of them inside me, the taste of their mouths, the way they held me. But nothing more.