Halsey Street (2018) by Naima Coster

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Halsey Street (2018)

by Naima Coster

Halsey Street and Bedford Avenue, Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 9/28

New York: 82/105

  Halsey Street is another POV novel about a woman who is the child of an African American father and Dominican mother, Penelope.  It's a little different than most of the other books that fit that description because this is not a bildungsroman- the protagonist is already an adult woman living in Pittsburgh and working (beneath her education) as a bartender, fucking random white guys she meets at said bars.  Reality comes home when she gets a call from a neighbor about her ex-record store owner Pop, who is having major health issues in the aftermath of the departure of his wife and Penelope's mother to the Dominican Republic, where she has decided to retire, alone after a working life of cleaning houses.

 Penelope returns home to confront her family demons and learn a little bit about herself in the process.

  Coster also gives us chapters told from the perspective of the escaped Mom, living in her dream home down in the Dominican Republic, and several chapters take place there.   In other words, Halsey Street is closer to the "adult woman returns home to confront family issues" story line that is more common in places like Vermont and New Hampshire.  Penelope stands out as a character via her singular lack of achievment in life- one year at RISD before dropping out to pursue her bartending passion because teachers said she was "drawing too much" at art school.

  Penelope is as sad as any white girl in the 1,001 Novels Project.  I would have like to know more about the father- his back story establishes that he was raised in an orphanage before going on to start his highly succesful record store as an adult, which seems like it would be borderline impossible based on the OTHER books from the 1,001 Novels project about the lives of other African American men in New York CIty.  I would have liked to have heard THAT story, not the book I got about his sad adult daughter who doesn't know what to do with her life.  Boo-hoo.