The Shape of Dreams

In this second novel by the award-winning novelist, a trio of women in East Harlem come together in friendship and tragedy when a murder occurs and a neighborhood tries to seek justice from a system that has forgotten them.
We’re in East Harlem, in the mid-eighties, and the large and formidable (some say crazy woman) Twin Johnson discovers the body of Anita’s boy, Tyrone, on the sidewalk. She does just what her uncle, who runs his basement crack den as a family business, warned her never to do: she calls the police, setting in motion a cycle of events that expand the consciousness of this struggling community. Anita, a postal worker, army widow, and church lady, is determined to solve her son’s murder, but her quest for justice rattles the neighborhood, which itself is like a complex character in this teeming novel, with its Mets fans and gossips, immigrant shop owners and sneaker-obsessed teens on its garbage-piled streets. The local dreamers include a charismatic man of the cloth, a teenage girl with a Whitney Houston voice and no prospects at all, and Anita’s opinionated friend, Wanda, whose own truant son the police harass and arrest on a regular basis, and who brings both blessings and curses into Anita’s exploded world.
Anita, Wanda, and Twin, the power triad of this vibrant novel, are all drawn into the basement den as the reader sinks into their rich backstories. Will they be able to break its spell? Will the Reverend’s pressure on the authorities to find Tyrone’s killer yield answers? In the end, in the NY Mets’ banner summer of 1986, this community will come together to mourn, find justice, and shape their dreams as best they can.

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.