What is motherhood in the midst of uncertainty, buried trauma, and an
unraveling America? What it's always been--a love song.
Our narrator is a gifted photographer, an uncertain wife, an infertile
mother, a biracial woman in an unraveling America. As she grapples with
a lifetime of ambivalence about motherhood, yet another act of police
brutality makes headlines, and this time the victim is Noah, a boy in
her photography class. Unmoored by the grief of a recent devastating
miscarriage and Noah's fight for his life, she worries she can no longer
chase the hope of having a child, no longer wants to bring a Black body
into the world. Yet her husband Asher--contributing white, Jewish genes
alongside her Black-Japanese ones for any potential child--is just as
desperate to keep trying. Throwing herself into a new documentary on
motherhood, and making secret visits to Noah in the hospital, this when
she learns she is, impossibly, pregnant. As the future shifts once
again, she must decide yet again what she dares hope for the shape of
her future to be. Fearless, timely, blazing with voice, Blue Hour is a
fragmentary novel with unignorable storytelling power.
