Salt The Water

Candice Iloh started her third novel. Salt The Water, for fun. "This book was born of my desire to play again: to shake things up in a way that felt irreverent, defiant, exciting, and about something much bigger than me. I wanted to go back to before I began fearing consequences or whether my art could feed me. I wanted to love it the way I first did as a sophomore at Howard University, showing up at open mics every week, hungry to be moved and in deep connection."
Their choice of a shape shifting free verse rather than prose provides a very irreverent, defiant, and exciting framework for the the narrative. And protagonist Cerulean pulls no punches, describing their world with no filters getting between them and the reader.
Cerulean has free thinking parents who encourage them to live authentically and unabashedly. This probably makes it harder for them to navigate a crushingly routinized and restrictive public high school. It's also harder because much a younger brother, who came along when the family was better off financially, is enrolled in an Afrocentric Montessori school
"How he gets to learn about farming & art & community
from real-life situations & teachers who let them
explore & make mistakes & talk back
when something doesn't make sense to him

while I'm stuck in stiff-ass classrooms
facing the same direction every day
staring down out-of-touch white men
who don't care if i really learn

who measure what i know by how well i do on a test"
When things really blow up at school Cerulean stops going. The plans he and his besties have don't involve college or traditional jobs.
But then his dad is badly injured at work, leaving the family a lot more precarious.
I advise high school teachers and college professors to ditch one of the long dead white male writers and have their students analyze Salt The Water.
On a purrrsonal note, we're in the heat wave. I'm not going anywhere. When it gets hotter I'm going to stop working and spend the rest of the day reading and hydrating.
A great big shout out goes out to my readers who I hope are hydrating and taking other precautions to beat the heat.
Jules Hathaway