The fantasies of future things

A recent graduate of Morehouse College, 21-year-old Jacob and his colleague Daniel, who are both gay and Black, work as project managers for a development company that will transform the Summerhill neighborhood of Atlanta. Their boss, a white woman named Beth, is oblivious to the damage this will do to the neighborhood and its residents. Sherman, a social worker who has clients in the neighborhood, is not. He chides Jacob for working for such an unfeeling firm. The two begin a rocky relationship. Meanwhile, Daniel is obsessed with discovering the identity of his father, a Black man--his mother, the only parent he's known, and his two siblings are all white. When Daniel discovers who his father is, he and Jacob become further enmeshed in the Summerhill project. Will Jacob and Sherman reconcile, and will Daniel find a way to approach his father? Jones' insightful, character-driven, and important debut novel is a success, boasting a strong theme and setting with charismatic characters.

In Jones's resonant if underdeveloped debut, two young Black men uneasily take part in a real estate scheme to raze houses for the 1996 summer Olympics. Jacob and Daniel's white boss, Beth, tasks them with knocking on doors in Atlanta's Summerhill neighborhood--"not quite a ghetto, but almost," Jones writes--to make offers on her behalf. After Jacob is beaten by disgruntled residents protesting against Beth's development plans, he refuses to press charges out of sympathy for their position. Then Jacob is set up on a date with protest organizer Sherman, who is shocked to learn that he works for Beth. The episode adds to Jacob's struggle with accepting his sexuality and coming out to his parents. Meanwhile, Daniel searches for his father, whom he never knew, and tension brews between the coworkers when he makes an unwanted pass at Jacob. Jones takes a deep dive into the effects of housing inequality on the city's Black community, and he offers many perceptive insights into Black male sexuality, as Jacob tries to envision what his life would look like if he were openly gay. Unfortunately, as the men's story lines converge, extensive flashbacks and narrative digressions reveal too little, particularly about Daniel, leaving the novel feeling unbalanced. Still, Jones is a writer worth keeping tabs on. Agent: Haley Heidmemann, WME. (Apr.)

As Atlanta prepares for the 1996 Olympics, two young Black men deal with challenges at work and in their personal lives. Jacob is a Brooklyn native, staying on in Atlanta after graduating from Morehouse to take a job with a real estate developer who has won the contract to "revitaliz[e]" (aka destroy and gentrify) the Black neighborhoods near the Olympic Village. He knows he's gay, but has had very little experience and has not come out to his parents. He works closely with Daniel, an Atlanta native whose white mother has recently died without ever having explained to him how he is Black while his siblings and her husband are all white. Daniel, too, is dealing with confusion about his sexuality. As the book lays it out, in characteristically passionate prose, "Was a life--this life--between two Black men possible? Two Black men in love and protecting each other against whatever was out there in the world, moving together toward an unknown future?" The dual aspirations of this debut novel--to create a detailed, fact-based portrait of Atlanta on the cusp of change and to depict the pressures on gay Black men coming of age in the 1990s--are both realized, the former with detailed research about the specific neighborhoods involved, the latter with intense dramatic situations and inner monologues. Anger breaks through in fistfights, verbal showdowns, and a near-riot. Sometimes, the author seems not to trust us to keep the stakes and the big picture in mind. In the middle of a conversation with a new man in his life, Jacob begins ruminating on "the conversation that lurked just beneath their discussion" and "the unvoiced masculinity code," themes already strongly articulated in the novel. During a tense meeting in the school principal's office about a teacher who has made a remark about Daniel's parentage, obviously different than his siblings', it occurs to Daniel's mother that "life roamed beyond them in that office--wild, reckless, unpredictably wonderful and unexpected. Life, large and sweeping, filled with gasps of intensity and excitement." These are lovely observations but seem unlikely to have occurred to her in the moment. Another issue is that Jacob and Daniel's boss, a white woman, is a two-dimensional villain, though her portrayal is explicitly linked to "the history of what little Black boys and little white girls have always been told about each other." An ambitious and heartfelt debut. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.