THE SHAPE OF DREAMS

A disquieting and savage era of not-so-benign neglect of at-risk Black New Yorkers during the Reagan years is evoked with poignant warmth and unflinching precision.

It’s the middle of the Morning-in-America 1980s and the era’s go-go financial opulence is an unfounded rumor in East Harlem, where the crack epidemic has taken hold along with its attendant crime wave and debilitating malaise. One very early morning in October 1985, Matilda “Twin” Johnson, a lifelong El Barrio resident and self-styled “roaming soul” who is “almost six feet tall…[and] a kiss away from three hundred pounds,” comes across the body of 12-year-old Tyrone Jackson in a pile of garbage. Going against her initial instincts and the stringent demands of her drug-dealing Uncle Manuel, Twin notifies the police. Tyrone’s mother, Anita, a military widow and postal worker, is devastated and determined to solve his murder with help from her “crazy” friend Wanda, whose own son Daryl is more prone to trouble with the NYPD than Tyrone. The women are aided by their earnest, ambitious neighborhood pastor, the Rev. Carl Harpon, whose church has been burned down in a suspicious fire. (Daryl is a prime suspect.) Reynolds—author of Knee-Deep in Wonder (2003)—deftly weaves in the lives of other local residents, including the mothers who, like Anita and Wanda, no longer have a church to go to but maintain their solidarity by getting the neighborhood involved in finding out who killed Tyrone, whose own final days are recounted in flashbacks. As the months pass, Anita and Wanda are pulled deeper into despair by false leads, dead ends, and the toxic allure of crack itself, even while their neighbors continue to help search for Tyrone’s killer. Reading this engrossing novel is like watching East Harlem morph into the shape of a shabby but tenacious dreamer imprisoned in a time and place where dreams can be snuffed out as haphazardly as the lives of its young.

A crafty murder mystery in the multihued form of an urban symphony.