Jackson's novel is beautifully written and sad and hopeful in a way that aches. People of color used to outnumber whites in Northeast Portland neighborhoods, and that's the milieu in which Jackson's excellent novel THE RESIDUE YEARS is set…. “The troubling thing about the way Portland has been packaged and sold and mocked on TV and sold again in the past decade is that the image of benign quirkiness we currently project is utterly homogenous, and utterly white…. “Here is a rude awakening for everyone who thinks they’re getting all they need to know about Oregon’s largest city from ‘Portlandia.’ In autobiographical novel it’s crack, not coffee, that feeds the story.” -Billy Heller, New York Post “Authenticity and a rhythmic prose propel Jackson’s debut novel.” -Time Out New York Terrific.” -Kate Saunders, The Times (London) “This novel is written with a breathtaking, exhilarating assurance and wit. “A fresh new voice in fiction.” -Abbe Wright, O, The Oprah Magazine “Powerful…full of impossible hope….Jackson’s prose has a spoken-word cadence, the language flying off the page with percussive energy…there is a warmth and a hard-won wisdom about the intersection of race and poverty in America.” -Roxane Gay, The New York Times Book Review Honest in its portrayal, with cadences that dazzle, The Residue Years signals the arrival of a writer set to awe. In this world of few options and little opportunity, where love is your strength and your weakness, this family fights for family and against what tears one apart. But selling crack is the only sure way he knows to achieve his dream. Champ is trying to do right by his mom and younger brothers, and dreams of reclaiming the only home he and his family have ever shared. Grace is just out of a drug treatment program, trying to stay clean and get her kids back. The Residue Years switches between the perspectives of a young man, Champ, and his mother, Grace. In his commanding autobiographical novel, Mitchell writes what it was to come of age in that time and place, with a break-out voice that’s nothing less than extraordinary.
In the ’90s, those streets and beyond had fallen under the shadow of crack cocaine and its familiar mayhem. Jackson grew up black in a neglected neighborhood in America’s whitest city, Portland, Oregon. ORDER: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | POWELL’s | Apple
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