![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() There are novels that anchor themselves in specific moments in time, like Tim Lane’s 1980s bildungsroman Your Silent Face, the historical children’s novels of Christopher Paul Curtis, and Detroit fiction from Joyce Carol Oates and Elmore Leonard to Desiree Cooper and Michael Zadoorian. ![]() There are memoirs of renovating those abandoned houses and delivering water through the crisis. There are many books that speak to particular facets of Flint and Detroit’s histories: the rise and fall of the automotive industry, the musical legacies of Motown, garage rock, and techno. That’s the kind of story I hoped to tell in Chevy in the Hole, a novel that follows two families in Flint from the 1937 Sit-Down Strike at General Motors to the ongoing water crisis. As someone who’s spent her life in these cities, and as an avid reader, I’m always craving this: a story that both affirms the community around me and teaches me things that makes me sit with uncomfortable questions and question my positionality. Their rich histories, their contradictions, how privilege and inequity, pride and grief, hope and rage, can all live next door to each other. Seldom are these cities treated to full and nuanced portraits. ![]()
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