April SinclairRecensioni

It was a pretty fun read, about a young African American girl growing up on Chicago's Southside during the 60's. It wasn't great, and at times heavy handed, in discussing the narrator's family and their relationship to the civil rights and Black Power movements. However, lots of funny bits about growing up in the 60's, so I enjoyed it overall.½

between 1.5 and 2 stars. i wanted to like this, and i do for what she was trying to do. there is so much she wants to say here, and get across. the points she's making - about racism and gender and class and sexuality and homophobia and growing up and maybe even about religion - are important and good. but maybe she's trying to do too much. and her writing is not good. i mean, it's not terrible either, but it's just not good. there were some fun parts, though.

i was interested to see how long the tone deaf "not all white people" retort has been in circulation. (sigh.)½

This was just way too much. Within the first 50 pages the author hits you with incest, eating disorders, office harassment, coming out of the closet in middle age, being an orphan and the of course the most tired of tired tropes, the lonely fat broken middle-aged black woman in search of a good black man.

It's actually emotionally draining to read all of this, especially since the narrator is totally devoid of humor, wit, warmth, or even more than the most basic and immature interests in everything including her own life. The plot is routine, the writing is boring and just...don't read this one, okay? Read "Coffee Will Make You Black" instead. It's also not that good but its iconic and broke major ground in it's day, unlike this.

I struggled with what to write about this book because so many things were going on that I feel like I would need a flowchart to explain how everything was connected. So many things popped up while reading this book for me and I a lot of different memories running through my brain about my own family.

I thought that this book by April Sinclair was brilliant. Overall, I loved this book. There were some minor issues that I had, but not enough to rate the book below five stars.

I emphasized with the main character Jean (known as Stevie) throughout this entire book. Stevie wants to be part of the cool girls at her school. She is at times frustrated with her mother who she sees as having no friends and life and only seems to be around to make Stevie do chores and for her to talk "white". Stevie is doing a delicate balancing act of having friends and trying not to do or say anything to alienate them, while also trying to still be involved with things that she wants to.

The other characters in the story, such as Stevie's father, and her brother's don't seem to be written as richly as Stevie, her mother, and her grandmother.

Additionally, the book being broken up into parts showing Stevie at middle school and then high school and we get to see her becoming aware that she may not be like the other girls she has grown up with. Included with that we get to see her reactions to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in Chicago at the time was very informative. Seeing Stevie struggle to fit in with the cool group to having an epiphany that if her friends don't like that she may be a certain way, that they were not good friends after all was great to see.

I thought that the writing was very crisp though at times it was odd to read Stevie's thoughts (written perfectly) but then trying to decipher what someone was saying since Ms. Sinclair wrote the words as they would sound if pronounced sometimes.

The setting of Chicago in winter, summer, spring felt very real to me. You can tell that the author actually lived or at least visited this city since everything she wrote in the story rang true.

I did not grow up in the 1960s in Chicago like the main character Stevie did. However, I did grow up with a close knit family that had some of the same discussions that Stevie's family did about race. I remember hearing about the paper bag test when I was growing up. And I totally eavesdropped all of the time and heard people discussing "good hair".

I can also speak to the double-edged sword of being too light or too dark in the black community. Being too light was not great since you were accused of trying to look white, and being too dark was not great since you were told you were too black. The same issue would emerge if you talked correctly since you were told you were trying to sound "white" or putting on airs.

I now want to read Ain't Gonna be the Same Fool Twice, the sequel to Coffee Will Make you Black in order to see what happened with Stevie.

An interesting look at the life of a black girl in the mid-1960s America, and how she dealt with everyone else's expectations of her. Learning what was really important to her along the way.

(I was provided with a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review)
OKAY WOW
This book was so good. It's a coming of age story from the point of a black girl in the 1960's. I was hooked from the very fist page at the line "Mama, are you a virgin?". The book covers everything from skin tone to sexuality to having "bad" hair. This is the best book I've read in a long time, and I highly recommend it to people of all ages.

Coffee Will Make You Black is an engrossing, fun read about a Black girl growing up in the the 1960's and 1970's in Chicago. Smart and curious, Stevie, like most adolescents, is searching for her niche in school, family and in her community. I liked Stevie and could easily relate to her struggle to find her own authentic voice while desperately wanting to fit in. Due to this desperation, she often makes choices that do not always fit who she truly "is" around friendship, sexuality, school and Coffee Will Make You Black portrays this journey in a fresh and often funny manner. Some of my favorite parts were the relationship between Stevie, and her mother and grandmother; three generations of women who grew up female in very different times giving each other grief, support and love. I also thought that Ms Sinclair did an excellent job of portraying the politics of that time, how race and racism and civil rights impacted in a day to day way a community, school and Stevie's growing self. The only part that felt jarring is when Stevie began to explore her bisexuality. It felt suddenly dropped in from nowhere and didn't seem to fit the narrative. I was curious that Ms Sinclair chose to have Stevie crush out on an older, white woman but I did like how by deciding to explore her sexuality Stevie came closer to seeing what she really wanted in friendships and love.

Thank you to NetGalley for allowing me to review this book for an honest opinion.½

I read the first chapter, in which the only thing discussed are comparative skin tones, and had to put it aside and read something else. Then, being stubborn, I picked it up again and bulled on through.

Ok, first of all, I am almost never a fan of mainstream books narrated by pre-teens. (Genre books do this shockingly well, for reasons that people have written theses about.) But I barely made it past the opening "conflict," in which there is a terrible misunderstanding because the poor girl doesn't know what "virgin" means. It doesn't really get less cliched than that, ever. While having no plot as such beyond "twelve-year-old goes through junior high and high school" is fine for this sort of book, I suppose, it felt awfully formless to me. The latter half of the book is made up of random one-page scenes where someone says or does something stereotypical and the main character responds in a way that proves she's growing as a person. I mean, seriously, every single character is some kind of stereotype, from the bad girl best friend to the random jealous flaming gay guy on the street to the young black guy in the late sixties who gets political and the boyfriend who appears to be a standup guy until she tells him she doesn't want to sleep with him.

I felt guilty about my initial reaction, but the longer I read the more justified I felt. This is not a good book, although it'd probably be perfect fodder for a sophomore high school class.

I almost didn't read this because I disliked its predecessor so much, but it was the last book in my library stack and it's not about twelve-year-olds. It was a substantial improvement, anyway, although many of the fundamental flaws are still there.

The characters are still pretty much one-dimensional, although they're not quite as cardboard-cutout as in the previous book. (And make no mistake, this is a sequel - it's just the next five years of the same character's life.) Since it's set in San Francisco in the mid-seventies rather than Chicago in the late 60s, they tend to be hippie or queer stereotypes rather than inner-city ones, which is, well, it's different, anyway. There are still at least a few one-shot "here's a scene to show what racism/sexism/homophobia is like" that don't really fit in the narrative at all, but they're not as constant. The writing is definitely defter, which made it a more pleasant read.

It's also still a pretty formless book. The touching scene at the end is nice and all, but there's still really no plot, as such. I like plot. I know that makes me plebian. I'm not sorry.

nice inside on black girls growing up in the sixties when the the new generation of free blacks tried to succeed.

Amazing

About six months ago I read "Coffee Will Make You Black", which was a coming of age story set in the late 60s and early 70s in a poor black Chicago neighborhood. Stevie Stevenson told the story, and a little of the book was devoted to her questioning her own sexuality. "Ain't Gonna Be the Same Fool Twice" is a sequal. Stevie is a few years older, and the book begins in college, and ends about a year after graduation... mostly set in San Francisco. The book touches on friendships and drug culture some, but it is primarily a memoir like tale of a young black bisexual woman, leaning to the lesbian side. Having grown up under traditional "family values", Stevie has trouble accepting herself, and is usually the polite, old fashioned person in any group of friends. April Sinclair writes well, but for me this one is no more than a three star book just because the subject of lesbian discovery in a new age town wasn't something I wanted to read a whole book about. I was expecting a book more like "Coffee Will Make You Black." If the subject matter sounds interesting to you, then I think you would like the book more than I, and rate it higher.

I was really surprised that I (white male) enjoyed a book so much whose target audience was definitely black women. There is no one single plot that carries the book. It is more of a vignette of events and episodes, both cultural and personal about a young black teen girl growing up in Chicago in the mid 60s. I couldn't help but empathize with Stevie, (the narrator), and worry about her, and love her.