How Long 'Til Black Future Month? by N.K. Jemisin

From the publisher: Three-time Hugo Award winner and NYT bestselling author N. K. Jemisin challenges and delights readers with thought-provoking narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption that sharply examine modern society in her first collection of short fiction, which includes never-before-seen stories.

Spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow South must save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story "The City Born Great," a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis's soul.

My book club has moved on-line in wake of the COVID pandemic, and we've switched gears in our selection. Realizing that many of us are having trouble finishing full length books, we chose the short story anthology How Long 'Til Black Future Month by N. K. Jemisin to follow up our discussion of Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi. I do love a good anthology, and it's been close to a year since I've read one. And this was a fantastic book to jump back in with.

Published in 2018, HLTBHM is a collection of 22 stories covering the range from speculative fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, urban fantasy, and dystopia. According to other reviewers, some are set in the same worlds as Jemisin's novels. I haven't read any of her previous works, and followed the stories in question with no issue. The majority of the main characters are black, and at least half of them are women. Overall, I found this to be a great collection. 'The City Born Great' absolutely deserved its 2017 Hugo nomination (the same year that N. K. Jemisin won Best Novel for the second year in a row). Other stand outs include 'Red Dirt Witch', the Jim Crow era fey story mentioned by the publisher, 'The Effluent Engine' set in a steampunk New Orleans that I would love to see more of, and 'Valedictorian', where the top student in each high school class is taken away, never to be seen again. There are a number of stories that didn't really grab me, and 'The Evaluators' suffered from formatting in that it told its story through dated emails and other transmissions that didn't scan very easily. In writing this review, it has also become very noticeable that the story title is not at the top of the page, making it difficult to flip back through. Overall, however, this is a wonderful anthology, and definitely worth your time.

How Long 'Til Black Future Month is available for curbside checkout from Galesburg Public Library in both regular and large print versions, as well as through the Libby app.