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What we lose by zinzi clemmons6/19/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() We learn about the astonishingly high mortality rates from breast cancer among African-American women. Organized into short almost diary-like entries, the not-a-novel effect is magnified by the inclusion of photos, charts, rap lyrics, and blog posts. She nicely plays with form to convey content the book seems at times like a memoir and, at others, like a collection of minute essays. In all these instances, she interrogates each binary as well as the space in between as she tries to figure out who she is and how to move forward.Ĭlemmons has written a novel that doesn’t quite feel like a novel. And then Thandi’s mother dies from cancer, and she is a daughter without a mother before becoming a mother to a son. Over the course of the book, Thandi matures from a teenager to a young woman. ![]() Although Thandi is brought up in Philadelphia, her mother’s ties to her home country are strong, and the family visits most summers. The protagonist, Thandi, is of mixed-race, with an American father and a South African mother. Much of What We Lose, an innovative and engaging debut novel by Zinzi Clemmons, is about being stuck in the in-between. ![]()
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