I just couldn’t push through. Though I feel like the point of it was the author wanting non POC readers to feel like that, but overall it just wasn’t my vibe. 

Long Division is possibly the last book I will teach to a group of students for some time. It is the third time I have read Long Division, and the 2x w/ the revised & republished version. Last year I felt my young people had developed the independent skills to encounter it on their own, but they got lost in some of the complexities of the text, and it made me understand I had to revise the way I approached it with myself, and my students this year. More of them are loving on it and appreciating it this time around, and I can’t say enough about how much of a wonder and a reading experience this book is. Kiese’s description of characters, the uncompromising southern Blackness of it, the “messiness” of the timelines, the uniqueness of the 2013 City, LaVander, Grandma, Coach Stroud, MyMy, 1985 City, Shalaya, Baize, Evan, Rozier, and Mama Lara, and all the questions and portals it asks of us as readers is a work of a brilliant artist. The young people, this year, explored it through American history and organizing, communal love, racial violence, and choices in a society that hates its young. Overall, it is just hella fun and funny, and it is easily the greatest published novel of the last ten years. I know I may have named other texts in conversations or posts as the greatest, but right now, for me this is true. Long Division is a one of one treasure of literary arts, and we are all better on the other end due to Kiese’s genius.   

Edit: Unfortunately, I read the digital copy as that was the only copy at my library and from reading other reviews I really missed out. Apparently, in print it's a book you read half and then flip over. I would have LOVED to experience that reading it the first time. :c 

Original review: What a beautiful, weird piece of Southern sci-fi. Really glad I picked this up. 

At some points, I'd feel confused, but not in a bad way, or a frustrating way, but in an intriguing that-was-not-what-I-expected way. I loved the main characters constant "random" questions that were never really random. I loved the layers in this book. I'm absolutely positive it will give up more secrets on a re-read. 

The part where Shalaya gives up Baize to change the future, though, that was super hard to read. I couldn't have done it. I couldn't look my son in the face and then choose a different path to where he doesn't exist.

I wish the book had been more explicit in the end about what happens to them and their family. And I wish I had a more concrete why on how the two Citys were connected.