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Mitchell S. Jackson grew up black in a neglected neighborhood in America's whitest city, Portland, Oregon. In the '90s, those streets and beyond had fallen under the shadow of crack cocaine and its familiar mayhem. In his commanding autobiographical novel, Mitchell writes what it was to come of age in that time and place, with a break-out voice that's nothing less than extraordinary.
The Residue Years switches between the perspectives of a young man, Champ, and his mother, Grace. Grace is just out of a drug treatment program, trying to stay clean and get her kids back. Champ is trying to do right by his mom and younger brothers, and dreams of reclaiming the only home he and his family have ever shared. But selling crack is the only sure way he knows to achieve his dream. In this world of few options and little opportunity, where love is your strength and your weakness, this family fights for family and against what tears one apart.
Honest in its portrayal, with cadences that dazzle, The Residue Years signals the arrival of a writer set to awe.
"Jackson's poetic prose is a joy to read...The ways mother and son grapple with social judgment and limited choices are provocative and timely in view of the current American cultural focus on personal responsibility." - Booklist
"A bleak and depressing--yet searingly forthright and honest--confrontation with the mean streets of urban decay." - Kirkus Reviews
"Their story is as moving as it is unbearable. Jackson's prose has a spoken-word cadence, the language flying off the page with percussive energy…There is warmth and wit, and a hard-won wisdom about the intersection of race and poverty in America." - New York Times Book Review
"[A] powerful debut... full of impossible hope... Jackson's prose has a spoken-word cadence, the language flying off the page with percussive energy... There is warmth and wit, and a hard-won wisdom." - Roxane Gay, The New York Times Book Review
"A fresh new voice in fiction." - O, The Oprah Magazine
"Completely gripping... Beautifully written and sad and hopeful in a way that aches." - Portland Mercury
"Authenticity and a rhythmic prose propel [this] debut novel." - Time Out New York
"I was touched by characters whose lives were often as real for me as my memories of growing up. The language invented to tell their stories engages, challenges, clarifies the American language, claiming it, enlarging it." - John Edgar Wideman, author of Fanon, Philadelphia Fire, and Brothers and Keepers
"In this raw heartwreck of a novel, every bit of personal wisdom is hard-won. Here is Grace, mother of Champ: 'Some people are latecomers to themselves, but who we are will soon enough surround us.' It's a searing claim and prophecy about lives severely tested. The author is entirely persuasive, such that Grace and her sons, given vivid voice, are one of the fictional families I have cared about most." - Amy Hempel, author of The Collected Stories
"The language in this book is as gut-wrenching as it is stunning, at once an elegy and an anthem. The Residue Years is a story about doing what you must until you can do what you want. But most of all, it is about all the sacrifices we're willing to make for love." - Maaza Mengiste, author of Beneath the Lion's Gaze
"It's so tough to write beautifully about ugly things, but Mitchell S. Jackson makes it look easy. The Residue Years is the story of a man and woman trying their best to overcome the enormous hurdles life has put in front of them, two portraits of the courageous battle to simply do one's best. This is a memorable, powerful novel and Mitchell S. Jackson is a genuine talent." - Victor LaValle, author of The Devil in Silver
This information about The Residue Years 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.
Mitchell S. Jackson was born and raised in Portland. He holds a masters of writing from Portland State University and an M.F.A. from New York University. He teaches writing at NYU, Medgar Evers College, and John Jay College, and also works as a journalist, writing about rap for Vibe, the Source, and others. He is a winner of the Hurston Wright Award for College Writers and a fellowship at the Center for Fiction. He is also the author of the ebook Oversoul. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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