{ "item_title" : "The Shape of Dreams", "item_author" : [" April Reynolds "], "item_description" : "A trio of women bond in friendship as a neighborhood tries to seek justice from a system that has forgotten them.The Shape of Dreams is a powerful prayer, a novel that indicts the injustice for which there is no quick solution. . . . It is] a song of furor and tenderness that will leave its mark. --Walter Mosley, bestselling author of the Easy Rawlins series It's the mid-eighties in East Harlem: a twelve-year-old black boy's murdered body is found by Mathilda Twin Johnson, an unlikely hero who is both the neighborhood's troublemaker and its conscience. When she breaks a cardinal rule--don't call the cops--her decision ensnares a community and brings unmanageable grief to a mother. Anita, a postal worker and army widow, is determined to solve her son's Tyrone's murder, and her quest galvanizes the neighborhood, which is itself a complex character in this teeming novel, with its Mets fans and gossips, immigrant shop owners and latch-key kids. The local dreamers include a charismatic man of the cloth, a teenage girl with a Whitney Houston voice and no prospects, and Anita's opinionated friend Wanda, whose truant son the police harass and arrest on a regular basis. Everyone is struggling. Anita, Wanda and Twin, the triad of this vibrant novel, are drawn into the neighborhood drug trap, while a singer, a preacher, and the church ladies who follow him believe their dreams can shape a city. Will the three be able to break away from crack's dangerous allure? Will the reverend's pressure on the authorities to find Tyrone's killer yield answers? Will justice come to East Harlem? In the end, during the New York Mets' banner summer of 1986, this community will come together to mourn, fight for a better life, and shape their dreams as best they can.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers4.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/0/59/331/686/059331686X_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "29.00", "online_price" : "29.00", "our_price" : "29.00", "club_price" : "29.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

Overview

Customers Also Bought

Details

In 1985, Harlem was at the leading edge of a crime wave that would take a decade to subside. Amid an epidemic of crack cocaine use, the New York City neighborhood was a rough place to live, and a rougher place to grow up. Unless, of course, you didn’t get to. At the outset of April Reynolds’ gritty novel The Shape of Dreams, the body of 12-year-old Tyrone Jackson is discovered under a pile of garbage. If it takes a village to raise a child, it also takes a village to find him justice, and when the neighborhood residents are largely blown off by the police, they take it upon themselves to unravel the mystery. Tyrone’s Army widow mother, Anita, is dogged in the quest to solve her son's murder, but she is plagued by both her grief and the distractions of the drug that has her community in its thrall. Her friend Wanda (whose son was Tyrone’s friend) proves to be both help and hindrance at various junctures, as do the ambitious pastor Carl and the church ladies who form his flock. As much as this is a whodunit, The Shape of Dreams is also a snapshot of a community where “misery sat at their tables like an unwelcome guest, eating up everything these families had and then shamelessly reaching for more.” Set in the lead-up to the Mets’ improbable 1986 World Series victory, it offers a vision of triumph despite overwhelming odds, albeit somewhat more bittersweet for the folks of Harlem than the inhabitants of the baseball diamond.