Its characters, both white and Black, seem two-dimensional and inexplicable, all while making what can politely be described as questionable choices.

Reid’s novel, while squirmily accurate in its depiction of the eagerness of a certain type of white folks to gain proximity to and curry favor with Black people, is a strange combination of the madcap and the static. Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age became a best seller when it was published in 2019 its story of a young Black babysitter wrongly accused by police in a tony Center City grocery store of kidnapping the white toddler in her charge was a featured selection of Reese Witherspoon’s book club. Over the past few years, several novels have attempted some such interpretation, or at least made use of Philadelphia’s particular brand of racially and economically diverse disarray. The mess of America’s “poorest big city” - its tangled systems, its established aristocracy, and the miserable way in which its public institutions have been defunded and its Black and brown communities disregarded - begs for interpretation. By day, I siphoned resources away from the school district, albeit indirectly after work, I called their offices and begged them to cover my repairs. But the sickening crush of fiberglass outside my window, and the chaos that followed, became symbolic for me, in the six years in which I lived and worked in Philadelphia, of the city’s way of thrusting together wildly disparate people amid scarce resources, and forcing them to scramble through the ensuing squall. I simply became mired in the bureaucracy of the local school district and their whimsical approach to vehicle insurance.

The crash was not exactly propulsive - the man and I did not become friends, nor did I leave my questionable charter-school job. I nodded and sadly assessed the damage to my modest, but new, Japanese car. The driver (an older Black man) explained to me (a younger white woman) that he had fallen asleep at the wheel. The van, as it turned out, belonged to the School District of Philadelphia. The move had been prompted by my partner’s work I was feeling guilty about taking a job (reluctantly, out of necessity) with an organization that was arguably leading the charge in privatizing the city’s beleaguered public schools. THE DAY I MOVED to Philadelphia, a large white van drove into my small, black car, which was parked outside my new apartment.

Asali solomon the days of afrekete