The Shape of Dreams: A Novel - Hardcover

Reynolds, April

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 059331686X ISBN 13: 9780593316863

Verlag: Knopf, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

APRIL REYNOLDS is the author of the novel Knee-Deep in Wonder, which won the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation Award and the PEN American Center: Beyond Margins Award. She co-wrote The Red Rooster Cookbook with Marcus Samuelson and is co-editor, with Henry Louis Gates Jr., of The Toni Morrison Reader and The Zora Neale Hurston Reader. Reynolds has taught creative writing at New York University and the 92nd Street Y, and currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. A former resident of East Harlem, she now lives in Astoria, Queens.

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Chapter 1

October 1985

It was not a pretty neighborhood. There was too much hunger and lack for gorgeous architecture to take hold. Rich people were never interested in building block after stately block of brownstones. So the good people of East Harlem gussied up where they lived with what they had. Saint Agnes and Saint Thomas peeked out windows, surrounded by dumb cane and Chinese evergreen. Puerto Rican flags provided both curtains and declarations. This neighborhood was not as grand as Harlem proper, but everyone who hung their hat here knew its allure. One hundred forty-one blocks crowded in Germans, Scandinavians, the Jews, the Irish, Italians, blacks, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, and Mexicans who wanted to make this patch of Manhattan their first stop on the island. As folks came and went, the neighborhood changed its name to fit the times—East Harlem, then Italian Harlem, then El Barrio or Spanish Harlem for those who couldn’t roll their r’s. The Italians fought and lost to Robert Moses’s wrecking whims; Puerto Ricans who could fled to Jersey for the privilege of a backyard. But black folks stayed.

When East Harlem was farm country, black people picked crops; when shantytowns sprang up, they moved in and worked the stockyards. They worshipped in storefront churches, ate arroz con pollo, and bought whiting from the fish market for breakfast. Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson housing projects were built and black folks settled in, dreaming of moving in with their better-off cousins who lived near Lenox Avenue. And every once in a while, some black family scraped together what they could, got a loan from Grandmomma, told an Uncle Willie Boy he could have the top floor if he pitched in, and bought a building that in the seventies no one else wanted.

Twin Johnson lived in one of those buildings. Instead of an Uncle Willie Boy, she had an Uncle Manuel, and instead of being at home and in bed—it was well before dawn—Twin crouched on the sidewalk, watching her neighborhood reveal a murderous secret.

Sitting on her fat haunches and surrounded by a week’s worth of city garbage, Twin wanted to spit. Instead, she swallowed hard. Twice. The smell of Modelo beer bottles overflowing with pee filled her nose, but so did the stink of the dead boy she had just found. She could only see his face’s profile and an arm. The rest of him was concealed, tucked under corded cardboard and trash bags. Small black flies marched along his unbearably long lashes.

Their constant movement made it seem as if he were winking. Twin rummaged her memory. Did she know him? This kid wasn’t one of her cousin’s lookout boys or some little man making a score for his momma. He wasn’t one of the neighborhood’s young who dared each other to walk up to her and ask her to let him hold ten dollars for a couple of days. Twin touched his elbow and thought, Naw, he’s just one more dead black boy on Second Avenue between 109th and 110th hidden beneath garbage on a Wednesday. She ought to have been grateful that the building and its trash out front weren’t hers, but she couldn’t get the emotion off the ground.

Twin looked down the avenue to make sure no one was coming. With dawn hours away El Barrio was still dark. Its sidewalk empty. Gaylord White, Lehman, Wilson housing projects created high square mountains; the avenue made the valley; trash bags cluttered together looked like out-of-place shrubbery. Like always the East Harlem skyline took her breath away. This scenery—bodegas, funeral parlors, pizza shops—was the only kind of nature Twin knew and loved. And since she wasn’t being watched for her well-known antics as the neighborhood crazy, she peered at the kid’s half-opened mouth (he really was beautiful) and murmured what was on her heart: “Oh, sweet baby.”

What Twin wouldn’t give right now for her own hands to be her mother’s or a preacher’s. On her knees, the older woman massaged her scalp then rubbed her elbows. His eyelids still moved as if he dreamt. Back and forth. Her skin erupted in goose bumps, and Twin told herself it was because of the weather. She hung her head. She had earned her place as a bitch you don’t fuck with in El Barrio, or at least on 117th Street. But her thickened skin, along with her toughened reputation, felt supple now. This was the third dead body she had seen this year. The second one she had touched. It was only October. Not even cold yet.

In February she had found an old white woman, freckled and soft, folded into a piece of luggage. Maybe you got limber, she had thought, when you get that little and old. Twin was glad for once that she was a big woman. Otherwise some asshole could put her whole person inside a suitcase meant for weekend travel. Naked as a newborn the dead old lady was smiling, so Twin had zipped her back up and left her in the abandoned community garden underneath the tire where she had found her. Twin didn’t shake a bit when she told her uncle all about it over rice and peas. That was winter, 1985. Then at the start of spring she had walked around some Puerto Rican guy in a black-and-green tracksuit and a torn wifebeater, murdered on the footbridge at 103rd that connected Manhattan to Wards Island. Shot a bunch of times in the stomach, twice in the head, stabbed in the arm. Whatever he had done, the fucker who did him wanted to make sure he was good and dead. Twin had lifted a leg, pointed a toe, and stepped over him, careful not to step into the puddle of blood.

Stranger danger, baby girl. Those two bodies, she thought, had been the price she paid for being a roaming soul. Since she was twelve, she had a body that woke hours before dawn and wanted to be outside. Her momma had told her, “Stranger danger, baby girl. The Lord only looks after the good and the innocent, and you ain’t neither one.” But the warning never stopped her from shoving her size eleven feet in slippers, in sneakers, in combat boots, longing for outside, craving to breathe in the four a.m. chill. Fifty years later her uncle Manuel, who bossed her, her cousin, and his drug enterprise, still asked, “What you do out there, girl?” when she trudged back home with hefty bags full of odds and odder.

“Roam.”

Sometimes she would tilt her head and marvel at the only things that soared in El Barrio: the housing projects. Twin looked down the rare building alleys, stuck her hand in sandboxes, found combs with missing teeth, unopened letters from Child Services. She’d stuff them all inside her black plastic bag. It was a good way to mark the time.

In her fifty-seven years of wandering, nobody had messed with her. Twin, almost six feet tall if you included her picked-out Jheri curl, a kiss away from three hundred pounds, walked El Barrio all times of night, sober as a church, mean as a drunk. Most of her neighbors crossed the street when they saw her coming. The hustlers and the homeless nodded when she passed by. Her uncle and cousin dealt weed and crack out of a Jamaican botanical shop on 110th and Second Avenue; they had made a trap in the basement of the tenement building where they all lived. They owned the place; they thought they owned the block. “We the ones who keep you safe.” Twin would nod her head as she emptied out her private treasure from a trash bag. There was no harm in nodding. She never told her family what she really thought—that every now and again when she found a preacher and a church that would have her, it was the congregation that kept her safe and whole, even when she wasn’t sitting in the pews. Her uncle would never believe that folks would be worried they might be fucking with a follower of the Lord God, Jesus Christ Our...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 059331686X
• ISBN 13: 9780593316863
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Knopf; https://knopfdoubleday.com; ; 3 Queen Caroline Street Hammersmith; London; W6 9PE; Vereinigtes Königreich
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar