“And I try to record the scent of outdoors and flowers and dust and lavender and old tears so I can carry it with me.”
After reading Latoya Watkins’s Perish, I stated that it wasn’t for me, writing “There are definite echoes of Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston, but it is much more ragged, raw and brutal and it never has the sun break free of the clouds.” And while The Book of Chuck (Tiny Reparations 2026) is very similar to Perish, there’s a more hopeful element to it. I couldn’t put it down.
Set in Texas and spanning four generations, The Book of Chuck follows one family’s clairvoyant curse and the shattered family bonds left its wake. In 1936, Nannie, a baby that shouldn’t have been able to speak yet, touches her father. “Pa, no go. Him burn,” she says. A family curse, passed down through her father, has made her able to see her father’s death before it happened. Following her father’s death, her mother severs the maternal bond, though not as drastically as her mother in law had. Nannie grows up and gives birth to several children, including Chuck. Chuck carries the curse, and much like Nannie’s mother had forsaken her, Nannie pushes him away and he is raised by others. As an adult, he returns to Nannie to seek answers and belonging.
Flash forward to 1999 and Chuck’s youngest daughter, Baby. Chuck is dead, her mother has remarried, and Baby has begun to see things when she touches someone. She has questions about the father she doesn’t remember, so she seeks out the family she doesn’t know.
It’s an excellent family saga. You will love Chuck. Mostly. And Lettie. Mostly. People are neither all good nor all bad – we all live in the grey.
Read this book.
