The Days of Afrekete

May 1, 2021

After her husband, Winn, fails in his run for the state legislature, Liselle Belmont suffers through the dinner party she's holding to thank key supporters while confronting the knowledge, gleaned from an FBI agent, that Winn is corrupt. She's so distant from socially engaged college friend Selena that they barely spoke when encountering each other after Barack Obama's election. But the women may come together yet. From National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 honoree Solomon (Disgruntled), inspired by Mrs. Dalloway and Sula.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 9, 2021
In Rona Jaffe Award winner Solomon’s illuminating latest (after Disgruntled), two middle-aged women who were friends at Bryn Mawr reflect on sexuality, race, and selfhood. While Liselle Belmont prepares to host a dinner party for her husband, Winn, at their house in Philadelphia after his failed state legislative bid, she remembers her mother’s taunts her about her upper echelon lifestyle, habitually delivered with an “acid whoop of laughter.” On a whim, Liselle leaves a phone message with her old friend and lover Selena Octave. Solomon flashes back to the women’s years at Bryn Mawr, where they met in the school’s first Black literature course taught by a Black professor (and which was overcrowded by white students), and digs into the nuances of campus lesbianism and racial politics. Since then, Selena has been in and out of a psychiatric hospital for anxiety, and the two have fallen out of touch. Liselle reflects on her “ever twoness as the Black mistress of a tiny plantation,” complete with a housemaid, and Solomon focuses on Selena’s sensitivity to racial trauma, such as her interest in writing about the MOVE bombing in West Philadelphia in 1985. When Selena finally receives Liselle’s message, and as Liselle frets about Winn’s legal troubles, the outcome is unexpected and powerful. Solomon brings wit and incisive commentary to this pristine take on two characters’ fascinating and painful lives. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group.

Starred review from October 15, 2021
As failure and shame threaten to demolish her world, a Black woman throws a dinner party...and thinks wistfully about her past. Known as "The Wolf" by her sister lesbians at Bryn Mawr 20 years ago, Liselle is now married to a White man, a lawyer-turned-politician named Winn Anderson. Winn has just lost an election for the state legislature, and Liselle has planned a dinner party as a last hurrah for their biggest supporters. Her doubts about the evening are compounded by the fear that her husband will be hauled away by the FBI before dessert; though he doesn't know it yet, she's been told he may soon be indicted for corruption. Set in the author's hometown of Philadelphia, this novel--part social satire, part character study--takes its title from a trickster in Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982). Liselle read Lorde her senior year of college, during her brief affair with a woman named Selena Octave. Though they haven't seen each other in years, the pile-up of disappointments in Liselle's life inspires her to call and leave a one-word message for her old friend. Solomon excels at ironic description--one character has "the look of someone who had aged out of playing the rich jerk in an eighties teen movie"--and builds further ironies into her depiction of race and class. While Liselle is often called Lisa, Lisette, Liesl, etc., she herself is afraid to say aloud the name of the woman helping her in the kitchen, Xochitl. In contemplating the conversational possibilities of the gathering, she thinks, "There was so much lying all the time, particularly when you got together with people who were not Black. Bland observations about schools, neighborhoods, and the words 'kids' and 'safe' and 'family' tried to cover up a landscape of volcanos oozing with blood, pus, and shit." The last page of the book will leave you stunned. Solomon's decision about where to end her dinner party puts her in a lineage of modernist party hosts like Woolf and Proust. What starts out a smoothly entertaining social satire turns out to expect a little work from you, dear reader.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from September 15, 2021
In this tender novel of roads not taken, Liselle's life is outwardly perfect. She's the African American wife of Winn, a telegenic white candidate for the state legislature, their tony home a far cry from the struggling Philadelphia neighborhood in which she grew up. Yet on the night that Winn's political career, their marriage, and their brittle lifestyle may just come crashing down, Liselle impulsively dials a number from 20 years ago. Selena was one of few other Black girls at Bryn Mawr in the mid-1990s; she was also Liselle's passionate first love, and neither woman has been able to get over the other. As life spirals them further and further apart--Liselle into bourgeois respectability and Selena into debilitating mental illness (". . . she'd actually looked crazy. Not melancholy, liberal arts-educated crazy, but downtown-asking-in-a-high-voice-for--seventy-six-cents crazy")--their one touchstone is each other. Now, as Liselle desperately tries to reassemble the shards of her life with Winn, and Selena tries to surmount overwhelming waves of depression and anxiety, memories of their brief college affair form the lifeline they cling to, though perhaps it's not what they need. In her second novel, following Disgruntled (2015), Solomon charts the social and cultural geography of her native Philadelphia with clear-eyed affection, and gives each woman character a full-throated voice. Unforgettable.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.