SHUT UP AND READ

Bookstore dreams.

This book is many things. It is a memoir of a young Black woman making her way through the artistic and literary life of Philadelphia in the 2010s and ’20s. It is a tale of loving and losing a father. It is a collection of letters to the living and the dead, yearning for connection. Shortly before the Covid-19 lockdown, Cook opened a bookshop in Philadelphia. She called it Harriett’s, after Harriet Tubman, the leader of the Underground Railroad. Readers learn of the day-to-day travails of owning a bookstore, buying a building, and building a community of readers. But what we really learn is how to manage life through literature and, furthermore, how reading and writing can be acts of social resistance and political change. Cook writes, “Books are for time travel, I tell the youth, they help us to find freedom; we don’t need to invent a way out, when the way has already been made. All we have to do is shut up and read.” Harriett’s Bookshop becomes a theater of the Black woman’s voice, and Tubman, Phillis Wheatley, Ida B. Wells, and Josephine Baker come to life in letters that the author writes to them. A pilgrimage to Paris takes the author to the places Baker sang, and as we learn that she had served in the intelligence community in World War II, we’re taken into the true purpose of this story. In the words of Jessica Barber, who writes about Cook in these pages, “Jeannine has been able to stay motivated by frequently invoking the spirit of Ida B. Wells, as well as Baker and Tubman, in her advocacy and projects, drawing parallels between historical struggles against oppression and current challenges faced by independent bookstores and threats to intellectual freedom.” This infectious and moving memoir celebrates that work.

A ringing affirmation of Black women’s voices, reaching from bookstore aisles to the streets.