Blue Hour
A Novel
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A Barack Obama 2023 Summer Reading selection
What is motherhood in the midst of uncertainty, buried trauma, and an unraveling America? What it’s always been—a love song.
Our narrator is a gifted photographer, an uncertain wife, an infertile mother, a biracial woman in an unraveling America. As she grapples with a lifetime of ambivalence about motherhood, yet another act of police brutality makes headlines, and this time the victim is Noah, a boy in her photography class. Unmoored by the grief of a recent devastating miscarriage and Noah’s fight for his life, she worries she can no longer chase the hope of having a child, no longer wants to bring a Black body into the world. Yet her husband Asher—contributing white, Jewish genes alongside her Black-Japanese ones for any potential child—is just as desperate to keep trying.
Throwing herself into a new documentary on motherhood, and making secret visits to Noah in the hospital, this when she learns she is, impossibly, pregnant. As the future shifts once again, she must decide yet again what she dares hope for the shape of her future to be. Fearless, timely, blazing with voice, Blue Hour is a fragmentary novel with unignorable storytelling power.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Harrison's debut chronicles a mixed race woman's harrowing journey through contemporary American motherhood. The unnamed narrator, who is Black and Japanese, deals with a litany of tragedies. When she's 22, most of her family is killed in a car accident. She pursues a career in photography, and at 28 she marries Asher, a Jewish man who runs a clothing boutique. Though Asher wants to start a family, two miscarriages sour the narrator on the idea of having children. Her grief is exacerbated when Noah, a student in her photography class, is shot by the police, and she feels responsible because the shooting happened while her class was meant to be in session—she'd canceled it for a fertility appointment. As she surreptitiously visits Noah in the hospital, she discovers she's pregnant, and her fear of having another miscarriage blends with a dueling worry of bringing a child into a world rife with police violence. In lyrical language, Harrison skillfully explores the complex tensions that gnaw at the expectant mother ("We hold our breath. All the way to the first, second, and third sonograms; all the way through sixteen weeks, we hold our breath") and offers an intimate view of the couple's pain. This signals the arrival of a brave new writer.
