For fans of Jacqueline Woodson and Brit Bennett, a striking coming-of-age debut about friendship, community, and resilience, set in the housing projects of Chicago during one life-changing summer.
LAST SUMMER ON STATE STREET
by Toya Wolfe
William Morrow, June 2022
(via The Gernert Company)
Even when we lose it all, we find the strength to rebuild. Felicia “Fe Fe” Stevens is living with her vigilantly loving mother and older teenaged brother, whom she adores, in building 4950 of Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes. It’s the summer of 1999, and her high-rise is next in line to be torn down by the Chicago Housing Authority. She, with the devout Precious Brown and Stacia Buchanan, daughter of a Gangster Disciple Queen-Pin, form a tentative trio and, for a brief moment, carve out for themselves a simple life of Double Dutch and innocence. But when Fe Fe welcomes a mysterious new friend, Tonya, into their fold, the dynamics shift, upending the lives of all four girls.
As their beloved neighborhood falls down around them, so too do their friendships and the structures of the four girls’ families. Fe Fe must make the painful decision of whom she can trust and whom she must let go. Decades later, as she remembers that fateful summer—just before her home was demolished, her life uprooted, and community forever changed—Fe Fe tries to make sense of the grief and fraught bonds that still haunt her and attempts to reclaim the love that never left.
Profound, reverent, and uplifting, LAST SUMMER ON STATE STREET explores the risk of connection against the backdrop of racist institutions, the restorative power of knowing and claiming one’s own past, and those defining relationships which form the heartbeat of our lives. Interweaving moments of reckoning and sustaining grace, debut author Toya Wolfe has crafted an era-defining story of finding a home — both in one’s history and in one’s self.
Toya Wolfe grew up in the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago’s South Side. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago. Her writing has appeared in African Voices, Chicago Journal, Chicago Reader, Hair Trigger 27, and WarpLand. She is the recipient of the Zora Neale Hurston-Bessie Head Fiction Award, the Union League Civic & Arts Foundation Short Story Competition, and the Betty Shifflet/John Schultz Short Story Award. She currently resides in Chicago. LAST SUMMER ON STATE STREET is her debut novel.
Bianca Bridge is at her wit’s end. Fired from her editorial job after scandalizing Trinidad’s tight, conservative society with an affair with a married government minister, she’s resorting to modeling for even the sleaziest of photographers to make ends meet. Her mother, were she still alive, would be stunned by whom her daughter has become. Her father — and his ample checkbook — is off somewhere with his second family. And the government minister? It was her precious Eric Hugo’s wife who got her fired. With nothing left to lose, Bianca agrees to assist the brilliant but aloof makeup artist Obadiah Cortland. A legend in the Trinidadian beauty community, Obadiah’s makeup-school-cum-beauty-salon, OC Beauty, complete even with its own magazine, is snobbishly exclusive. At least Bianca will get to write. Yet Obadiah is not the elite tyrant he seems. Born in the poorest part of Trinidad, he’s clawed part-way up society’s ladder and built OC Beauty around his meticulously crafted persona. He’s not about to let anyone see past his façade, especially not the headstrong ‘Miss Bridge.’ Still, Bianca and Obadiah work diligently, along with co-workers Radhika and Dante, while Trinidadian high society throws obstacles in their path. When Bianca discovers Obadiah’s unexpected connection to her former lover, however, and the power Eric Hugo is continuing to attempt to wield over her and the OC Beauty community she’s come to love, she’s finally ready to fight back like her mother taught her — and to reconsider, at last, the nature of what might deserve to be called beautiful.
In stories that beckon and haunt, FRUITING BODIES ranges confidently from the fantastical to the gothic to the uncanny as it follows characters—mostly queer, mostly women—on the precipice of change. Echoes of timeless myth and folklore reverberate through urgent narratives of discovery, appetite, and coming-of-age in a time of crisis.
Liv Reese wakes up in the back of a taxi with no idea where she is or how she got there. When she’s dropped off at the door of her brownstone, a stranger answers—a stranger who now lives in her apartment and forces her out in the cold. She reaches for her phone to call for help, only to discover it’s missing, and in its place is a bloodstained knife. That’s when she sees that her hands are covered in black pen, scribbled messages like graffiti on her skin: STAY AWAKE.
A young woman puts on a white coat for her first day as a student doctor. So begins this powerful debut, which follows our unnamed narrator through cadaver dissection, surgical rotation, difficult births, sudden deaths, and a budding relationship with a seminarian. In the troubled world of the hospital, where the language of blood tests and organ systems so often hides the heart of the matter, she works her way from one bed to another, from a man dying of substance use and tuberculosis, to a child in pain crisis, to a young woman, fading from confusion to aphasia to death. The long hours and heartrending work begin to blur the lines between her new life as a physician and the lifelong traumas she has fled.