Leaving Atlanta by Tayari Jones
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reading Tayari Jones’s first novel, the carefully crafted, moving account of young children living through the Atlanta child murders, remains one of the best first novels I have ever read. This is a truly literary exploration of the inner lives of people who feel themselves to be endangered from all sides, for whom the idea of a bogeyman is very real. The metaphor that overshadows the reality of a child killer is the larger picture of America, which Jones deals with in the most subtle way: there is always someone waiting to kill a black child. What they are seeing in the story of the child killer is the reality of their world. Yet Jones treats this idea with delicacy and without sentiment or polemic, simply allowing these young selves to unveil. It was a pretty good bet Jones would make her mark, and book after book she has taken the journey.