The Atlas of Reds and Blues (2019) by Devi S. Laskar

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Atlas of Reds and Blues (2019)

by Devi S. Laskar

Roswell Road and Johnson Ferry Road, Marietta, Georgia

Georgia: 4/26

   The Atlas of Reds and Blues is yet another novel on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America that is focused on the police shooting an innocent person for little or no reason.  I think I might be up to a half-dozen books with some variant of this plot out of the 200 novels I've read from this list.  So we are talking about 3 or 4 percent of this Library of America centering around police shootings of innocent citizens.  Here, the victim is the narrator, a Bengali-American woman living in suburban Georgia.  She is a Mom of three, she holds down a part-time "Mommy track" job at her local newspaper and her husband is away on business almost always.  The story is told in flashback perspective, which made it refreshing in a literary merit kind of way. 

  Unfortunately, her experience doesn't add much to the tapestry of American Lit this project represents.   This narrator is America, through and through, other than her complaining about the way she is treated by white people in suburban Georgia, you wouldn't even know she was Bengali-American.  The open, thoughtless racism she recounts had be checking the publication date to make sure I was reading something contemporary and not from the 1970's (though some of the racism was from the girlhood of this narrator.)

   And not specific to this book but to all of the narratives that involve people being shot by the cops.  Look, I've worked in criminal justice for my entire career. I am nothing is not empathetic to innocent victims of police brutality but what consistently amazes me about these narrative, fictional and real life, is that the victims never seem to understand what the Cops are thinking about before they shoot.   Like, don't you know it's a bad idea to make sudden movements and/or generally disregard what Cops are asking you to do, especially when they raise their voices?  People should have some awareness of how law enforcement reacts in stressful environments and try not to do those things.