gimley reviewed Long Division by Kiese Laymon
Review of 'Long Division' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
All things considered, you have to love a book with a "dynamic" sentence like "I guess you should also know that LaVander Peeler smells so good that sometimes you can't help but wonder if a small beast farted in your mouth when you're too close to him." I googled it because I didn't believe it original--it had to be part of some slang I was unfamiliar with--but the only hit was from this book. Or a sentence like "LaVander Peeler invented saying “Kindly pause” in the bathroom last year at the end of eighth grade. If you were pissing and another dude just walked in the bathroom and you wondered who was walking in the bathroom, or if you walked in the bathroom and just looked a little bit toward a dude already at a urinal, you had to say “Kindly pause." Or maybe, "They just renovated the bathrooms for …
All things considered, you have to love a book with a "dynamic" sentence like "I guess you should also know that LaVander Peeler smells so good that sometimes you can't help but wonder if a small beast farted in your mouth when you're too close to him." I googled it because I didn't believe it original--it had to be part of some slang I was unfamiliar with--but the only hit was from this book. Or a sentence like "LaVander Peeler invented saying “Kindly pause” in the bathroom last year at the end of eighth grade. If you were pissing and another dude just walked in the bathroom and you wondered who was walking in the bathroom, or if you walked in the bathroom and just looked a little bit toward a dude already at a urinal, you had to say “Kindly pause." Or maybe, "They just renovated the bathrooms for the first time in fifteen years and these rectangular tiles behind the urinal are now this deep dark blue that make you know that falling down and floating up are the same thing, even if you have severe bubble guts or constipation."
I like knowing that there's someplace in the world where people talk to each other the way they do in this novel but then I keep thinking that there are many such places but I am just too out of touch to be acquainted with them. After all, I had trouble following some of the turns of plot as well, or even knowing which year it was.
And sometimes I felt things were over-explained and over explicit, like the multiple choice test near the end, though it was a school environment so it made sense as well. But now I think this is because it's a first novel and Mr. Laymon was just finding his way.
Unlike some other Goodreads reviewers, I liked the time travel element, but maybe this is because unlike most of them, I was alive in 1964.
So to sum up (like one learns to do at school at the end of a review, say) there was a lot of powerful stuff going on in this book and though it never all came together for me, I appreciated what the author had accomplished with individual scenes, characters and relationships. And dynamic sentences.
