The Shape of Dreams - by April Reynolds (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A trio of women bond in friendship as a neighborhood tries to seek justice from a system that has forgotten them.

It's the mid-eighties in East Harlem: a twelve-year-old black boy's murdered body is found by Mathilda "Twin" Johnson, an unlikely hero who is both the neighborhood's troublemaker and its conscience. When she breaks a cardinal rule--"don't call the cops"--her decision ensnares a community and brings unmanageable grief to a mother. Anita, a postal worker and army widow is determined to solve her son Tyrone's murder, and her quest for justice galvanizes the neighborhood, which is itself a complex character in this teeming novel, with its Mets fans and gossips, immigrant shop owners and latch-key kids who are desperate to help a friend. The local dreamers include a charismatic man of the cloth, a teenage girl with a Whitney Houston voice and no prospects, and Anita's opinionated friend Wanda, whose truant son the police harass and arrest on a regular basis.

Everyone is struggling.

Anita, Wanda and Twin, the triad of this vibrant novel, are drawn into the neighborhood drug trap, while a singer, a preacher, and the church ladies who follow him believe their dreams can shape a city. Will the three be able to break away from crack's dangerous allure? Will the reverend's pressure on the authorities to find Tyrone's killer yield answers? Will justice come to East Harlem?

In the end, during the New York Mets' banner summer of 1986, this community will come together to mourn, fight for a better life, and shape their dreams as best they can.

Review Quotes

"Set in East Harlem in the mid-eighties, at the dawn of America's crack epidemic, April Reynold's The Shape of Dreams is ostensibly the tale of a child's tragic murder and a mother's desperate quest for justice. But like all revelatory novels about New York, it also tells the secret history of a community, of its neighborhood's written-off eccentrics who are also its eyes and ears, of its all-too-fallible leaders tasked with holding it together, and its denizens trying to forge dignified lives without losing their humanity in their struggle to survive. Vivid and heartbreaking, unyielding and gritty, it is, in the end, about the alliance of three unforgettable women who refuse to succumb to the overwhelming forces determined to rob them of their agency. A story, then, for right now." --Adam Ross, author of Playworld

"Intense and dreamlike, The Shape of Dreams is a vivid portrait of a community reckoning with violence, addiction, and surveillance in 1980s Harlem. In captivating prose, April Reynolds asks us to consider what we owe our children and each other in life's darkest moments." --Leila Mottley, author of Nightcrawling and The Girls Who Grew Big

"The Shape of Dreams offers a loving tribute to Harlem and the restorative power of female friendship while exposing the tiny soul fractures sustained by good people trying to get by in a broken world. With exquisite grace and reverence, Reynolds explores the inevitable heartbreaks of motherhood and wearying loneliness as the three women at the novel's center seek justice for a murdered son. Reynolds captivates as much as she reminds us that in the midst of unspeakable tragedy, the strength of the human spirit endures. Elegant, powerful and truly unforgettable." --Laura Warrell, author of Sweet, Soft Plenty Rhythm

About the Author

APRIL REYNOLDS is the author of the novel Knee-Deep in Wonder, which won the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation Award and the PEN American Center: Beyond Margins Award. She co-wrote The Red Rooster Cookbook with Marcus Samuelson and is co-editor, with Henry Louis Gates Jr., of The Toni Morrison Reader and The Zora Neale Hurston Reader. Reynolds has taught creative writing at New York University and the 92nd Street Y, and currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. A former resident of East Harlem, she now lives in Astoria, Queens.