Amy Biggart's Reviews > Recitatif

This is making the 2022 favorites shelf, because I can't stop thinking about it and have now re-listened to the audiobook like three times?

I really loved this. This is a shorty, but so thought-provoking. This short story serves as a bit of a thought experiment: At the start you find out that one of the two young girls at the center of this story is Black and one is white. Throughout this book you follow these two girls who spend a few months together at a shelter as children, and then when they meet over the course of the next 20 or so years. They both have slightly varied memories of their time in the shelter, different reasons for having been placed there in the first place, and different paths in life.

Toni Morrison is intentionally confusing in her characterizations of these girls. In a story where race is critical to the plot, you're left guessing as to which race each character is. As the reader, you must confront your own tendencies to attribute characteristics, life circumstances, vernacular, (you name it, really) to a specific race. It's also an intense example of the brain's desire to categorize things and people to simplify the world.

Beyond that, I found the character dynamics here and the conversation around memory and how it can be stored differently by different people to be captivating. This short book is worth its weight in gold. I just couldn't recommend this more highly. The audiobook was great and Zadie Smith's introduction was perfect.