"The Names of All the Flowers," by Melissa Valentine

As with Yaa Gyasi’s novel, “Transcendent Kingdom,” about which I posted last time (10/28/20), Melissa Valentine’s memoir “The Names of All the Flowers” (The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2020) has a central tragedy: a young woman’s tragic loss of her beloved brother. In both cases, fictional and real, the loss has to do with all the difficulties faced by young black men in the United States. Valentine in particular makes it very clear that her brother’s life represents so many young black men’s lives. Her father is white and her mother is black; they raise six children, always somewhat struggling for money, but hanging on to a barely middle-class life, and making sure their children get good educations. The place the author and her brother grow up is Oakland, California, which added to the interest of the memoir to me, as Oakland is in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I too live, but in a different county. The memoirist is the “good girl” who gets good grades, takes care of family members, and always mediates among family members when there is tension, but for the sake of her beloved brother Junior, she is willing to break some rules too. The memoir is about family, race, gender, education, and much more. It is well-written, feels very “real,” and is poignant and moving.