When the Reckoning Comes by LaTanya McQueen

When the Reckoning Comes is LaTanya McQueen's debut novel.  Mira, Jesse, and Celine were best friends in a segregated town. They were all poor, but Celine's advantage was that she was white and Mira's advantage was that she was smart. After an incident left Jesse outcast in town, Mira went away to college and never returned until Celine invited her to her wedding. The wedding is to be held at a renovated plantation and the mood is somber and tense from the very beginning.

This is really a novel examining the haunting history that surrounds most of land in the United States (and elsewhere, really).  Sure, there's a gripping thriller happening, but just when you've settled into the creepiness of the tale, McQueen includes a flashback to what the lives were like of the slaves on the plantation where the contemporary action is taking place. Those flashbacks jolt you back into an awareness that not all is right.  

McQueen did such an excellent job of setting the mood. It was crazy that I felt dread from the first scene when Mira is just grading papers at her desk.  And that tension never let up. 

But the characters of Celine and Jesse were just not well-developed enough for me to give an enthusiastic endorsement of the novel. It's short, just over 200 pages, and I actually think that McQueen could have added more pages to build on the story and character aspects of the novel and it would have been an excellent book. As is, it's an exciting debut and I'm excited for what she does next. 3.5/5 stars

Lines of note:

What she'd tried to forget had always been there, this piece of her past, this history. Mira had tried, had spent a decade trying, but a person can't run away from who they are. Soon enough, what's been buried will rear itself again. (page 74)

I think this is so interesting. Our pasts shape us in ways that just can't be undone.

"Yet because of them you're having your wedding here. At a plantation, Celine"

"It hasn't been a plantation for over a hundred years, and it's not like my family owned slaves."

"What about its history? The suffering that built it. That's never forgotten. Isn't it always there?" (page 103)

This is the heart of it, isn't it? A good reminder that places like this should not be a place for celebratory occasions. 

"The building is still there but like a lot of things in town, there's only the ghost of what it was." (page 134)

When I drive through my hometown, the buildings just seem so sad and depleted. The population dwindles with each census and what was once a booming lumber town is now just a place people speed through to get somewhere else.