"Growing up, everywhere around me there was death." Melissa Valentine's memoir, The Names of All the Flowers, is about growing up Black in Oakland, Calif. Valentine's extraordinary talent delves deep below the surface to memories permeated with the kind of reflection and understanding not often adaptable to writing. It also nearly defies suitable praise.
Valentine was raised with her five siblings by their Black postal-clerk mother and their white landscaper father. Of mixed race, living in a good neighborhood at the crossroads of a rich, mostly white enclave and a violence-ridden suburb, they endured a "setup perfectly designed for our failure, for our demise. Surviving the power and lure of the street... is the exception, not the rule." Valentine and her brother Junior were particularly close. With "stressed parents, little money, and little attention," Valentine felt it her duty to save Junior from the lure. No one could. Junior was shot and killed in West Oakland at 19.
The unfairness of Valentine's burden is heartbreaking, the trauma she suffers again each time there is another death, unrelenting. She is "left to make sense of the losses, pick our communities back up, and go on living after each one with no tools, no resources, and, because it is so normalized, no discussion.... Death should not be such a normal part of our lives. Burying young people should not be so normal." As a memoir, Valentine's work is stunning in its candor and breadth of emotion. As an expression of the Black experience in the U.S., it is a distinguished accomplishment. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review