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Honest "Bird" Bennett is a young Black girl with a hunger to learn what lies beyond the walls she shares with her mother, Maddy, and her grandmother, Odelia.
Their home resonates with the hum of Maddy's sewing machine, echoes of Bird preparing supper, and Odelia's stories of times past. The women live in Bennettsville, Illinois, a freedmen's town established by Bird's great-grandfather, where rural life pulses with church song and where peace is fragile with the neighboring white town, Tuckersville. As Bird comes of age, she must reckon with turbulence at home and with what it means to fall in love with a childhood friend. As an adult, rejecting a life of self-denial, Bird spreads her wings and finds a new home in Harlem. After a decade of growth and loss, she is summoned back to Bennettsville to confront her kin and her past as Tuckersville residents try to drive Black families from their own land.
In Belonging to the Air, author Avery Irons follows one family's intergenerational experience of the Great Migration. Among the novel's cast of characters are a blind matriarch, women who heal with herbs, and queer lovers. Irons's evocative and lyrical prose imagines a world in which these complicated characters try to care for one another in a country that does not care about them. History talks to and through itself as elders confront youngsters and as racism shapeshifts in rural and urban settings across the decades. With dialogue that jumps off the page and rings with a truth that lingers, Belonging to the Air urges readers to think about how constructions of race, love, and freedom have―and have not―changed over time, demanding that we consider the wisdom of our inner selves while we listen to that of our elders.
"A lovely bildungsroman, Belonging to the Air is about family, community bonds, forgiveness, and love." —Foreword Reviews
"Where queer Black women's stories from a century ago remain largely untold, Avery Irons is filling the void... This isn't just another historical novel. It's an act of preservation, a defiant reclamation of joy in the face of erasure, and a love letter to the queer Black ancestors whose stories were never allowed to be told." —Rolling Out
"Belonging to the Air is an exceptional and unique novel, rich in texture and filled with beauty and emotion. Its profound emotional landscape will resonate with readers for generations to come. It is destined to become a classic." ―Crystal Wilkinson, author of Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts and editor of the Screen Door Press imprint
"The historical fiction lesbian and queer women need urgently today. Bird's matriarchal family, rooted in its namesake Illinois town, Bennettsville, provides her the roots for belonging and the wings for air. This multigenerational queer story is vivid and compelling from the very first page." ―Julie R. Enszer, editor and publisher of Sinister Wisdom
This information about Belonging to the Air was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Avery Irons was born and raised in central Illinois. She is the author of the novella Glass Men, which won Big Fiction magazine's Novella Prize, and short fiction that has appeared in the African American Review, Ragazine, and Sinister Wisdom. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and received support for the completion of Belonging to the Air through the Kimbilio Novel Mentorship Program.
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