Christina Proenza-Coles' 3 favorite reads in 2023

The poetry, power, and grace of this novel, which is ostensibly about a contemporary Black woman and her family’s history in Georgia, in my opinion, manages to explain American history more effectively (and affectively) than any history book.

I grew up in Florida but spent many summers with my mom’s white family in Georgia. Those visits were among the reasons I turned to scholarship to try to understand our nation’s founding in slavery and freedom and its ever-present legacies.

While Jeffers’ protagonist, in fact, becomes a scholar, and the book continuously references one of our nation’s greatest historians/sociologists, W. E. B. Du Bois, this novel brilliantly reflects the multifaceted trauma and perseverance embedded in our national history in the most intimate stories of family. 

This sweeping, gorgeous, intergenerational epic begins in Kerala, India, at the start of the twentieth century. The characters are tragic and resilient, cursed and graced, living and dying, and I fell in love with each one.

What begins as a tale of a fourteen-year-old bride in a small Christian community in Southern India spirals into exquisite narrative tendrils that explore caste and class, politics and history, colonialism, family, love, and death in ways that both resonate with the particulars of American history as well as the universality of our violent, heartbreaking, and beautiful humanity.

Ultimately, each of us, all of us, are bound by the covenant of water.

These short stories centering a Jamaican family in Miami at the end of the twentieth century are mesmerizing.

Each story has a narrative tension that propels towards resolution, as it illuminates irresolvable tensions of race, class, ethnicity, and family in the Southern, Latin, Caribbean crossroads that is Miami. As a native of Miami myself - half “Anglo” and half “Latin” - I saw my hometown in both familiar and novel ways.

The Jamaican Anglo-African cultural context of these protagonists brings many of the absurdities and contractions of Miami’s Anglo/Latin/Black triad into relief as they simultaneously bring into sharper focus what it means to be American.