Set in rapidly gentrifying 1990s Oakland, this memoir - "poignant,
painful, and gorgeous" (Alicia Garza) - explores siblinghood,
adolescence, and grief for a family shattered by loss.
Melissa and her older brother Junior grow up running around the
disparate neighborhoods of 1990s Oakland, two of six children to a White
Quaker father and a Black Southern mother. But as Junior approaches
adolescence, a bullying incident and later a violent attack in school
leave him searching for power and a sense of self in all the wrong
places; he develops a hard front and falls into drug dealing. Right
before Junior's 20th birthday, the family is torn apart when he is
murdered as a result of gun violence.
The Names of All the Flowers connects one tragic death to a collective
grief for all Black people who die too young. A lyrical recounting of a
life lost, Melissa Valentine's debut memoir is an intimate portrait of a
family fractured by the school-to-prison pipeline and an enduring love
letter to an adored older brother. It is a call for justice amid endless
cycles of violence, grief, and trauma, declaring: "We are all witness
and therefore no one is spared from this loss."
"Valentine's heartfelt memoir of losing her brother expresses the grief
of being a black woman left behind when a black man dies to gun
violence, and the specific condition of growing up mixed race in
Oakland. As such, it's a portrait of a place, a person who died too
young, the systems that led to that death, and the keen insights of the
author herself. Lyrical and smart, with appropriate undercurrents of
rage." (Emily Raboteau, author of Searching for Zion: The Quest for
Home in the African Diaspora)
