Where I Must Go: A Novel - Hardcover

Jackson, Angela

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810151855 ISBN 13: 9780810151857

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2009

Synopsis

Lyrical, penetrating, and highly charged, this novel displays a delicately tuned sense of difference and belonging. Poet Angela Jackson brings her superb sense of language and of human possibility to the story of young Magdalena Grace, whose narration takes readers through both privilege and privation at the time of the American civil rights movement.

The novel moves from the privileged yet racially exclusive atmosphere of the fictional Eden University to the black neighborhoods of a Midwestern city and to ancestral Mississippi. Magdalena’s story includes a wide range of characters—black and white, male and female, favored with opportunity or denied it, the young in love and elders wise with hope. With and through each other, they struggle to understand the history they are living and making. With dazzling perceptiveness, Jackson’s narrator Magdalena tells of the complex interactions of people around her who embody the personal and the political at a crucial moment in their own lives and in the making of America.

About this title

About the Author

Angela Jackson was born in Greenville, Mississippi, raised on Chicago’s South Side, and educated at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. Her Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners, winner of the 1993 Chicago Sun-Times Book of the Year Award in Poetry and the 1994 Carl Sandburg Award for Poetry, and her selected poems, And All These Roads Be Luminous, are both published by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern.

From Publishers Weekly

Poet and playwright Jackson traverses the freshman year of protagonist Magdalena Grace, revealing the indignities that Maggie and her friends and family endure during the civil rights era. The loosely plotted narrative follows 17-year-old Maggie to Eden University in September 1967, where she is one of a few African-Americans on campus along with roommates Essie Witherspoon and Leona Pryor. Jackson portrays their youthful uncertainties, their desire to fight discrimination and their hesitancy about the future. In a series of vignettes, Maggie dips into black high culture, is a shaken observer to sudden violence, faces overt racism, is beset with family problems, learns the power of sexual attraction and, eventually, helps her friends mount a potentially dangerous protest. Overwritten and suffering from too large a cast of characters, the dazzling turns of phrase do not make up for a lack of cohesiveness. Admirers of Jackson will enjoy the poems that are sprinkled throughout the novel, but its sheer talkiness is a disappointment. (Sept.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0810151855
• ISBN 13: 9780810151857
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400