The Stars and the Blackness Between Them by Junauda Petrus
An embracing magical tenderness exudes from the pages of The Stars and the Blackness Between Them, artist and activist Junauda Petrus’ first novel, immediately upon opening the book. The novel revels in two main characters: Audre, a Trini teen whose wise grandmother supports and nurtures her even as Audre’s religious mother decides to send her to the U.S. after catching her with her first love, another girl; and Mabel, a Minneapolitan teen who thoughtfully explores her own identity, community, and family while struggling with a mysterious illness in her body. The two characters meet once Audre is sent to Minneapolis, and the novel joyfully disrupts young adult literary tropes of drama, gossip, and heavy focus on trends or technology. Instead, Audre and Mabel support one another, grow with one another, share with one another, and, slowly, gently, and deeply fall in love with one another.
Petrus fully trusts and loves her main characters. Instead of railing against their powerlessness as teens, Audre and Mabel both demonstrate their power: Audre serves as a healer and deep companion for Mabel, trusting the sense of magic and healing knowledge imparted to her by her grandmother, Queenie; Mabel takes up correspondence with a wrongfully imprisoned man and takes her opportunity to try to free him from incarceration. Both characters trust and listen to their dreams, intuitions, feelings, and bodies in a way that is inspirational, making The Stars and the Blackness Between Them a guide for self-love as well as an engrossing and moving novel. The characters build bridges with nature and with their families, even when the going is hard, and celebrate their blackness without minimizing the varied struggles and oppressions faced by the black diaspora.
Furthermore, Petrus trusts her readers. Dream sequences invite magical entryway into the youthful experience of Queenie, and poems evoke the energy of each astrological sign as the plot of the novel moves chronologically forward through the course of one year. Complex political issues and spiritual visions are both threads in this book’s fabric, and the reader is trusted to keep up without excessive explanation. In a particularly soulful narrative move, Petrus manages to craft a novel that is engrossing and compelling without resorting to melodrama or divisiveness, demonstrating that a book can be written where multiple romantic loves are cherished instead of seen as intrinsically competitive, where diversity amongst black people is celebrated instead of sublimated or posed as conflictual, and where non-heteronormative loves are similarly written as present, diverse, and powerful.
Subjects this book includes which some readers may be sensitive to: Homophobia, cancer, incarceration, death.