Angel of Greenwood

4.5 Thanks to NetGalley for the eARC! A beautifully written way to introduce Black Wall Street/Greenwood/the Tulsa Race Massacre to teens (think 7th grade up). Angel & Isaiah's love story is elegant and honest throughout. Pink has Angel arguing for Booker T. Washington and Isaiah obsessed with W.E.B. DuBois, a smartly nuanced way to introduce these writer/thinkers and their opposition and influence. Greenwood itself is the 3rd major character, and the chapters are set as a countdown to the night of the massacre. Pink doesn't shy away from the realistic horrors and also uses a few scenes from that night to complete redemptive character arcs. The writing was occasionally a little repetitive but that's a tiny quibble in a mostly flawless book. Emotional and necessary, this should definitely find readers!

I enjoyed this a lot! Not only does it tell a story that many (mostly white) people are just now learning about in the Greenwood Massacre but it also tells how wonderful Greenwood was. How it was a haven for Black people to live lives usually only afford to whites at that time with teens falling in love and getting cute summer jobs and getting into the idyllic trouble seen in 1950s tv shows like blowing up a mailbox.

Then the horror of the Massacre and the burning and the bombing. The contrast of it is so stark and well executed. Angel and Isaiah grow a lot before the Massacre and while I'm sure the trauma shapes them, they were already becoming who they would be before.

HMM okay, so like a lot of people probably I got interested in the Greenwood massacre after watching the Watchmen (ha) series on HBO. I also read [b:The Burning: The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 54860485 The Burning The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 Tim Madigan https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1607323562l/54860485.SY75.jpg 85600050] last year so I feel reasonably well-informed about the history presented here, and I think it really is such a horribly compelling moment in history and so illustrative of how fucked-up white privilege has been (and continues to be) in the US.That said I did not like...love this book? The pacing felt off to me and the two narrators both felt more like capital-s Symbols than people. Isaiah's devotion to DuBois vs Angel's devotion to Booker T. Washington ended up making me feel like I was watching a high school student skit demonstrating the differences between two major Black thought leaders. I simultaneously felt like there wasn't enough character development and also like it took too long to get to the action? It just didn't really work for me as a reader. I also was not at all surprised when I got to the ending and Pink's afterword mentions that she had wanted to write a low-conflict book about two Black kids in love without being affected by racism and then later she learned about Greenwood and retroactively applied that idea to the historical setting? And I think I would have rather read either that book OR something that had initially been conceived of as being about Greenwood, but this felt a little weirdly cobbled together.THAT SAID:- It's an undeniably interesting historical event and for teen readers who might not have heard about it before, that will carry more appeal- Always great to have more #OwnVoices Black romances- Would be really useful as a classroom read especially in conjunction with a history curriculumBut ultimately not really my personal jam as a reader.

Emotional, heartbreaking, and the characters were amazing. The change in perspectives is normally rough for me but the author did it beautifully. Definitely recommend.