Blue Hour by Tiffany Clarke Harrison

This short, quiet, deep, and thoughtful book was found by me through Obama's 2023 Summer Reading List, the last of the lot for me to read. The multi-ethnic photographer at the center of the book narrates the novel directly to her husband, a Jewish tie designer. We find out that she identifies as “Black, Haitian, Japanese.” This trilogy fuels her hurt as she mourns lost relationships and futures, as well as beginnings, endings, and in-between. There is a lot here, including grief, police brutality, sex versus love, and the ways we choose to cope with events we aren’t yet able to process. But what is central to the novel is parenthood--to be or not to be. The narrator and her husband consider having a child of their own, but live in the perpetual shadow of crimes committed by law enforcement against people of color. The decision to parent must contend not only with the terror of future loss, but also the guilt attending loss experienced in the narrator's past and present.