Harlem Shuffle, Colson Whitehead

 

Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead showed up on a lot of year-end books as one of the best books of 2021.

Started: 2/20/2022
Completed: 2/22/2022
Recommendation: Highly Recommended
Recommended By: Many year end lists

Review:

This seems like a collection of short stories with the same characters.  It is an excellent novelization of small-time grift in Harlem and helped flesh out what things must have been like up to and after the 1964 riots.  The riots are largely incidental to the book, but they help frame the activity.  The story is well told and the characters develop over the course of the book.  It is interesting to me how the two cousins were both alike and different and how both tried to live with their hunger to move up in the world.