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    Long Division
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    Long Division
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    Long Division
    Ebook317 pages4 hours

    Long Division

    By Kiese Laymon

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

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    About this ebook

    Long Division includes two distinct but tightly interwoven stories--one called "All Things Considered," the other "Long Division." In the first, it's March 2012: 14-year-old Citoyen "City" Coldson and his nemesis, LaVander Peeler, become the first black male duo to win the state of Mississippi's Can You Use This Word in a Sentence” contest finals. Both boys are asked to represent Mississippi at the televised national competition. (Hours before the contest begins, City is given a book without an author called "Long Division.") Turmoil and misunderstanding ensue, as City and LaVander learn they have reason to doubt the merit of their presence at the contest. They want us to win,” City says to LaVander moments before the contest starts. After being assigned, and then misusing, the word niggardly” in the first round of the contest, City has a remarkable on-stage meltdown in front of a national television audience. LaVander, on the other hand, though incredibly shaken, advances to the finals and has the chance to win the contest.

    The day after the contest, City is sent to spend the weekend with his grandmother in the small coastal community of Melahatchie, which is also the site of the mysterious disappearance of girl named Baize Shephard. Baize Shephard also happens to be one of the main characters in the book "Long Division," which City has been dipping into throughout the story. While in Melahatchie, City's troubled Uncle Relle reveals that City has become an overnight YouTube celebrity thanks to his on-stage meltdown, and that he is being sought to appear on a new television show called "Youtube’s
    Black Reality All Stars." City is alternately celebrated and ridiculed by the white and black residents of Melahatchie as a result of his performance at the contest, even as he delves deeper into "Long Division" and its story of the missing Baize Shephard.

    When the neighborhood is convinced that a white man nicknamed Pot-Belly has assaulted Baize and done away with her body, they beat the man to death...or so City thinks, until he finds the man alive, chained up in a workshed in the back yard of his grandmother’s house. City visits the imprisoned white man four times during the course of his weekend--reading to him from "Long Division," asking him questions he's always wanted to ask white people, and promising to save him if he survives his own baptism, which his grandmother has engineered during City's visit. When LaVander appears, he and City must reluctantly work together again, this time to save the life of the white man chained in the workshed--and quite possibly the life of City’s grandmother, too.

    There's something else that City finds especially interesting about "Long Division," besides the story of Baize: another main character in the book is also named City Coldson--except this City Coldson, who lives in Melahatchie, is 14 in 1985. This City will do anything to make Shalaya Crump love him--including traveling 26 years into the future (via a time portal they find in the woods) to steal a laptop and cellphone from a girl--a mysterious teenaged rapper named Baize Shephard, who lost her parents in Hurricane Katrina.

    The following day, Shalaya and City meet another worn down time-traveler, this one from 1964, a boy named "Jewish" Evan Altshuler. Evan is desperate to protect his family against the Klu Klux Klan during Freedom Summer. He convinces Shalaya that he can help her find her parents and her future self if she brings the laptop computer back to 1964 and does him a favor.

    Unexpectedly, City and Shalaya become separated, with Shalaya stuck in 1964 and City stuck in 2012. In their wanderings back and forward through time, much is revealed about City’s relationship with Baize, and about segregation, Freedom Summer, the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf Oil spill, and the limits of technology and love. Long Division is a Twain-esque exploration of ce
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAgate Bolden
    Release dateMay 20, 2013
    ISBN9781572847187
    Author

    Kiese Laymon

    Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. He is the author of the genre-bending novel Long Division, the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others, and the bestselling Heavy: An American Memoir, which won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the 2018 Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose. It was also chosen as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. The audiobook, read by the author, was named the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year. He is the founder of the Catherine Coleman Literary Arts and Justice Initiative, a program aimed at getting Mississippi kids and their parents more comfortable with reading, writing, revising, and sharing.

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    Reviews for Long Division

    3.5/5

    65 ratings12 reviews

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    • 3/5
      2.5 stars. There were some early chapters that I absolutely loved, and there is definitely something to this book that is new and different. But I think it required something of me that I didn't have to give. Undivided attention and devoted study, perhaps? I could give you the general outlines of the stor(y/ies), but I'm certain I would get confused in the details. Without expending more effort than I would normally put in, this stayed just a bit over my head. The characters were all interesting but I was so busy trying to keep them straight that I never developed feelings for them. I suspect this is a book that improves with a second reading, though.
    • 3/5
      Citoyen "City" Coldson is a black teenager in Mississippi dealing with racism and the difficulties of adolescence. But he also seems to be... a character in a book he's reading? Maybe a book that he himself wrote? One that involves time travel, and other kinds of strangeness.The novel's depiction of and commentary on racism and the way it affects people is pointed and painful and often very well done. Everything else about it... Man, I don't even know. It's weird, because I'm perfectly comfortable with time travel stories, and I'm okay with magic realism, and well practiced in believing six impossible things before breakfast. But the strangeness in this book... I just never really felt like I had a handle on it, never felt like it quite made sense to me, even on its own terms. Maybe that's the book, maybe that's me, I don't know. I did notice, when I was nearly finished with it, that there was a blurb on the back comparing Laymon to Murakami, which suddenly reminded me that I felt a very similar can't-quite-find-my-footing feeling with the one Murakami novel I've read, Kafka on the Shore. Although I found that one more interesting than frustrating, in the end, and I'm not sure I feel that way about this one.Rating: This is a hard one to rate. The aspects of it that worked for me worked really well, and I want to give it credit for that, but mostly I'm left with this unsatisfied what-the-hell-did-I-just-read? feeling. Let's go with 3/5.
    • 3/5
      Read from February 26 to March 02, 2014 I had a difficult time wrapping my brain around this book. There were moments of "Wow, this is great" mixed with "I have no idea what just happened" combined with "That entire paragraph made zero sense, did the author forget a few sentences?" and then "Is 1964, 2013, or 1985 -- who did that happen to and when?"I've never been a huge fan of time travel. (That's probably why I am not a Doctor Who fan, I can't grasp the when.) But this book was even more confusing than just time travel, it's also a book-within-a-book with the characters having the same names in both the book and the book-within-a-book . Yeah, wrap your brain around that. If this book had JUST been the story of City and Shalaya, I think I would have liked it much more. (Basically, I just found parts of it way too confusing.)
    • 4/5
      Oh what a refreshing gem this is. I love the humor, the characters, the writing is so full of life. Full full full. It gets a bit confusing with the time travel, and ends up seeming like the hand drawing a hand drawing, if I'm reading it as well as I hope I did. I feel like I missed so much though! The ending all but tells you to start the book over again, if only I had the time, but unless I start it again right away I don't think I could figure it out better than I already have. I can't really think about it without feeling my brain is broke. It's well worth the read anyway just for the writing style, even if you can't figure out this puzzle. I could probably think about this book for hours and never figure it out. I've got some questions! I can't tell if Laymon wrote the book intentionally vague or if I'm lacking some brain cells...so the book could probably be polished a bit, lose some loose ends. I especially loved the laptop dance party in 1964 but each page is filled with good stuff. I love that the characters compete in a sentence competition, as Laymon could certainly win one of those. The humor stays throughout the book, even when it gets confusing and sad. This book sure has HEART. I even had a dream that I was in the book with the characters. This reminds me of Mark Twain, Ralph Ellison, Victor LaValle and Haruki Murakami. If it wasn't for the Tournament of Books, I might not have found this one. A sad pairing in the ToB for this book to be against The Goldfinch. I feel like The Goldfinch was written a billion times before, but Long Division is the fresh beating heart of future books.... I will definitely be keeping an eye out for Laymon's writing in the future. Man, I need a drank.
    • 5/5
      This was a trip from beginning to end. I legitimately think it's an extremely strong four star book, but the fact that it's completely different from anything else I've been reading punches it out extra. It's a time travel novel (although not particularly science fiction-y, there isn't anything about how the time travel works, exactly), starting off with teenagers in 2013 post-Katrina rural Mississippi. (I think it's rural, I know nothing about Mississippi, there seemed to be a lot of woods) In addition to the time travel, you've a book-within-a-book story, featuring some of the same characters in various times. The humor was hitting me exactly right, too. I confess that, as usual, I struggled to keep up with exactly what thread was playing out in what way in what timeline, but that's definitely a problem I have often so I assume it's me. I mean, the broad strokes were clear, it's more like there were some details I know I fuzzed out a bit.It's not perfect, the tone oddly shifts around a bit and I'm not sure that was working for me, but overall, this book was hard to put down and whenever I had to, I found myself thinking about it a lot.
    • 2/5
      I get the praise for this novel - it is awesome from a literary and cultural standpoint. The author was ambitious, and it paid off. I wanted to love this book for these reasons, but it just never grabbed me. There were some incredibly emotionally raw moments that prove the author's talent. Overall, though, it just wasn't for me, and I almost hate to say that.
    • 5/5
      This book redefined genre. Mind blowing. I can’t wait to read everything that’s left his hand.
    • 3/5
      I liked how much this book tackled and its very satirical bent. I can have a hard time with time travel, though, and I think that's what tripped me up about this...between that and the book element, this might have been more effective to me if I had read it instead of listening to it. Worth a revisit, but I'm glad I read it. Yet another book that should have been nominated for an Alex.

      ********
      Read Harder: book about books (well A book in this case)
    • 3/5
      audio fiction (meta drama with time travel: 1964, 1985, 2013 Mississippi).Maybe I would be less confused if I'd read this in print, because it was sometimes tricky to remember if I was listening to the main story, or the story inside the book inside the book (also called Long Division). But I bet I would still be confused.The narration was, apart from that, really excellent and the characters were interesting.
    • 2/5
      When I first started this book, I was really interested in reading it. The first few pages grabbed my attention and I looked forward to reading the story. Somewhere in the middle of the book I got lost and confused as to what was actually going on. I don't even understand what happened at the end!
    • 3/5
      I don't know how much of this I really got, but I liked it. If you like twisty, time-travel, enigmatic books, you'll like it too.
    • 5/5
      Like nothing I’ve read before. It’s fascinating getting inside the head of the narrator, someone so different to myself. Age, race, background and so on. I’m going to re read this because I don’t fully understand what was going on but whatever the destination we arrived at the ride was immense. You’ll either love or hate this. I loved it. It’s truly genre bending and I enjoyed every moment of the authors wonderful writing style. It makes me want to visit the South, this and certain other books I’ve read as well as tv shows and films. I’d recommend it for anyone who wants to read something with depth and meaning, anyone who wants to be challenged, pulled out their comfort zone.