LIFE AND OTHER LOVE SONGS

A Black family in suburban Detroit is torn apart by long-held secrets.

In her sophomore novel, following The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls (2019), Gray again braids the narrative perspectives of three family members—here Daniel Ozro Armstead Jr.; his wife, Deborah; and his daughter, Trinity. Trinity narrates the opening section of the book, which is set at her father's funeral—though they are burying an empty casket because her father vanished years earlier and his death is only presumed. From there, the sections move back and forth in time to illuminate the situation and its aftermath, from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Oz, as he was called, grew up in rural Alabama, but after a fire took his father's life and burned their house to the ground in 1962, his mother, Pearl, took her two sons and fled to Detroit. Both boys have mysterious scars and keep the full story of what happened from everyone, including the beautiful up-and-coming singer Deborah, whom Oz meets at a rent party. So much hope and promise are vested in Deborah’s career, and in the life she and Oz create for Trinity—but her recording contract never materializes, she turns to alcohol, and their home in an all-White-except-for-them suburb becomes a tense and unhappy place. Gray keeps the narrative interest high by teasing out the mystery of Oz’s disappearance as the family splinters and the story follows them to Chicago, New York, and back to the rural South. Oz, the most complicated character, retains a core of decency even as his mistakes pile up, and Trinity is a snappy smart-mouth—“I, on the other hand, looked like an aging hooker who’d had a particularly bad night”—who injects the story with energy and moments of comic relief.

The trajectory of Gray's flawed but relatable characters offers hope that even deep, long-festering wounds can heal.