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Summary
Summary
A new American classic: a dynamic tale of triumph against the odds and the compelling story of one woman's struggle for equality that belongs alongside Jazz by Toni Morrison and The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Ivoe Williams, the precocious daughter of a Muslim cook and a metalsmith from central-east Texas, first ignites her lifelong obsession with journalism when she steals a newspaper from her mother's white employer. Living in the poor, segregated quarter of Little Tunis, Ivoe immerses herself in printed matter as an escape from her dour surroundings. She earns a scholarship to the prestigious Willetson College in Austin, only to return over-qualified to the menial labor offered by her hometown's racially-biased employers.
Ivoe eventually flees the Jim Crow South with her family and settles in Kansas City, where she and her former teacher and lover, Ona, found the first female-run African American newspaper, Jam! On the Vine . In the throes of the Red Summer--the 1919 outbreak of lynchings and race riots across the Midwest--Ivoe risks her freedom, and her life, to call attention to the atrocities of segregation in the American prison system.
Skillfully interweaving Ivoe's story with those of her family members, LaShonda Katrice Barnett's Jam! On the Vine is both an epic vision of the hardships and injustices that defined an era and a moving and compelling story of a complicated history we only thought we knew.
Author Notes
LaShonda Katrice Barnett was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1974 and grew up in Park Forest, Illinois. She is the author of a story collection and editor of the volumes: I Got Thunder: Black Women Songwriters On Their Craft (2007) and Off the Record: Conversations with African American & Brazilian Women Musicians (Rowman & Littlefield, Spring 2014). For short fiction she received the College Language Association Award and the New York Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Artist Grant. Recent awards for writing and historical fiction research include the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities & National Endowment for the Humanities grant #45.129; Mystic Seaport's Munson Institute of Maritime Culture Paul Cuffe Memorial Fellowship; Sewanee Writers Conference Tennessee Williams Scholarship and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Advanced Fiction fellowship. A graduate of the University of Missouri, she received an M.A. in Women's History from Sarah Lawrence College and the Ph.D. in American Studies from the College of William and Mary. She has taught literature and history at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, Hunter College and Brown University.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This wonderful debut novel takes the early 20th century and brings it to life, both in the South and in the Midwest. Ivoe Williams is a brilliant young woman who grows up in Texas, the child of emancipated slaves, and despite the obstacles she faces, manages to get a degree in journalism in Austin. But no newspapers will hire her because she is an African-American woman. Her frustration with the Jim Crow South causes her to uproot and move to Kansas City, where she and her lover, Ona, start a newspaper, the first female-run African-American newspaper, called Jam! On the Vine. She uses this platform to examine segregation and the American prison system of the day, sometimes at great personal risk. Barnett doesn't shy from exploring the queer community of the time, "othering" her protagonist even further, while the experiences of Ivoe's family add a wonderfully vibrant, fully realized vision of the shadowy corners of America's history. Agent: Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
In her first novel, Barnett skillfully plumbs historical accounts of black American life in the Jim Crow era and weaves them into an engaging and enlightening family saga. The story centers on Ivoe Williams, born in east Texas in 1888, a precocious young girl who becomes obsessed with reading as a means of escaping her seemingly hopeless life. Encouraged by her mentor, Ona, Ivoe earns a scholarship to Willetson Collegiate and Normal Institute in Austin, where she studies printing, typesetting, literature, and history. After graduation, Ivoe is prevented from following her dream of writing for a newspaper in both her hometown and Kansas City, where she is turned down repeatedly owing to her race and her gender. She is joined in Kansas City by Ona, her teacher- become-lover and together, in 1918, they found the first female-run African American newspaper, Jam! On the Vine, which shines light on black achievement as well as detailing the systemic economic oppression and brutality rooted in racism, which was so prevalent then, only one generation removed from slavery.--Donovan, Deborah Copyright 2015 Booklist
Kirkus Review
An impassioned historical novel chronicles the early-20th-century resurgence of African-American activism through the life of a poor Texas girl who channels a lifelong love of newsprint into a groundbreaking journalism career. Barnett, who has edited such anthologies as Off the Record: Conversations with African American and Brazilian Women Musicians (2014), makes her fiction debut with this coming-of-age saga, set at the hinge of the 19th and 20th centuries, about Ivoe Williams, a bright, avid daughter of a Muslim cook and a metalworker struggling to make ends meet in post-Reconstruction central Texas. Despite her bleak segregated environment, Ivoe grows up infatuated with the written word, most especially with the immediacy and color of newspapers she finds and, at least once, steals from her mother's white employer. Barnett excels here at what for most writers is a difficult task: evoking what it feels like to grow into one's calling as a writer through psychological intimacy as much as immediate experiences. The book is equally attentive in conceiving those who are closest to Ivoe, including her parents and siblings and two women with whom she would become emotionally involved while attending college: Berdis, the mercurial, flamboyant piano prodigy, and Ona, the magnetic, empathetic instructor who falls in love with Ivoe and eventually helps establish their own newspaper in Kansas City. Barnett's book is clearly inspired by the lives of crusading black journalists such as Ida B. Wells who inspired their communities to fight Jim Crow customs and legally sanctioned lynching. Yet most of those insurgent moments are crowdedjammed, if you willtoward the novel's end. One is left wanting less of a young black woman's rite of passage in a hostile environment, experiences amply represented in literature, and far more of Ivoe's journalistic accomplishments, about which there has been relatively little in American fiction. Now that we've seen how Ivoe Williams came to be, we'd like to see much more of the great things she was able to do with her craft. Maybe Barnett can oblige us. She's got the talent to do so. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In this lively and thought-provoking coming-of-age tale inspired by the life of newspaperwoman and activist Ida B. Wells, Ivoe Williams shares Wells's passion for the printed word as she struggles during the Jim Crow era to establish the first African American press on the eve of 1919's Red Summer. VERDICT Strong supporting characters and enlightening writing brings history to life in a meaningful work of fiction that should be welcomed by readers of Alice Walker, Lalita Tademy, and Tayari Jones. (LJ 12/15/14) (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.