Halsey Street is a book about love, loss, anger, grudges, forgiveness, and growth- with gentrification as a major theme.
Penelope is an unfulfilled artist, called back home to Halsey Street, Brooklyn, to care for her ailing father, who has his own issues to deal with, including his wife leaving and returning to her native Dominican Republic.
Penelope is forced to grow and forgive, and in the end, build a new relationship with her parents.
It is refreshing reading about families and their hardships, ups and downs, because they are real. We all go through them. Many, unfortunately, do not learn from mistakes for many reasons, including it being too late. The ending was satisfying, knowing Penelope and her father, Ralph, were doing what was right for their family, going to the DR together for some closure.

3.5 The oftentimes complicated relationship between mother and daughter is fully explored in this wonderful Noel, that takes us from Brooklyn, New York to the Dominican Republic. This is not a quick read, the pace is rather slow in fact, but it covers the gentrification of a neighborhood, the disintegration of a marriage, and of a daughter who may wait too long to reconcile with her mother.
What made this a special read for me is that I could picture all this happening, it is so vividly written, seemed so realistic.

Mirella, the mother, and Penelope, the daughter are complex characters, sometimes likable, many times not. Their misunderstandings, years in the making are not easily resolved, especially as Penny seems only to understand and relate to her father. They narrate their stories in alternate chapters, and I have to admit loving those set in the Dominican Republic, the colors, the flavors of the Caribbean, so lush. We find out what happened between Mirella and Ralph, how they came to live in different countries. There is an iconic record story whose closing will start the downward spiral of marriage and neighborhood. We see how gentrification changes things, makes them unrecognizable, neighborhood and people.

Most of all this is a realistic portray of the dynamics, flaws and all, of family relationships. Was a slower read but a good one.

ARC from Netgalley.

Penelope Grand is not a lovable character and neither is her mother Mirella. But they are interesting, complicated, independent women, and the colorfully drawn main characters in Halsey Street, an exciting debut novel by Naima Coster.

This engrossing story is about family and all its complications; it’s about loss, it’s about identity … and it’s about art. It’s also about losing (and finding) oneself, and about the human need to be belong. It asks the question, “can you go back home?” (and, for Penelope, do you want to?). And it insightfully looks at the practice of gentrification from various sides.

If you’re looking for happily ever after with tied up loose ends, you won’t find it here. What you will find is an interesting character study and an ode to Bed-Stuy, music, and art … and a beautifully written debut novel. Definitely worth your time!

Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for the review copy.

Thanks so much to Netgalley and Little A Books for providing me this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Plot: Penelope Grand is a young black failing artist who moves back home from Pittsburg to take care of her ailing father, Ralph. Her old neighborhood has been gentrified and taken over by affluent white people, and her mother Mirella left them to return to the Dominican Republic. So when Penny moves into the attic of the wealthy Harpers, she hopes for some semblance of family again. But a postcard arrives from Mirella, who is seeking reconciliation, and Penny’s world is once again turned upside down as old wounds are reopened, secrets are spilled, and she sets on a path of self-discovery.

It is the mark of a good book that has you still thinking about it days after you’ve finished reading it, and Halsey Street certainly fits the bill. For what comes across as a simple plot, Coster has by no means presented us with a simple novel. Layers upon layers upon layers are available for the reader’s contemplation.

The novel’s told from the perspective of both the Grand women- Penny and Mirella. Penny is a millennial who is flawed, vulnerable, and pragmatic. From her perspective, we are witness to a changed Brooklyn, the very real effects of gentrification- in the houses, the murals, the schools, the walls, her disdain for the mother that abandoned her, while Ralph Grand keeps his home as a shrine, unchanged from when she’d left it, while he drinks his days away hoping for Mirella to return. Her vulnerability is seen in her yearning and interactions when she stays with the Harpers, seeking connection and love. Through Mirella’s eyes we see how she and Ralph met, the changes in their relationship as Ralph focused on his record store, her gradually deteriorating relationship with Penny, how she felt in Brooklyn and the events that led to her departure, and her life in DR and how she makes it her own without being an extension of somebody else’s life. When Mirella writes to Penny seeking reconciliation, Penny is not immediately forgiving, a lot of stuff comes up for the both of them (together and separately), and we get to see where both women choose to go from there.

Coster has portrayed gentrification as a metaphor for broken families, and her execution of this is what makes this novel so phenomenal. You see it in Penny’s observations of the neighborhood, the school she teaches at, the rich white Harpers who are her landlord, and Ralph, who is a relic of old Brooklyn. She brings nuance into the conversation by inserting conversations of race, gender, and class- in Mirella’s chapters we see how she felt that Ralph and his friends never saw her as equal, and how her opinions on art and music and such were never taken seriously. Coster;s narrative power comes through also in her demonstrations of gentrification and its effects rather than statements of it. For instance, there’s a particular scene where Penny meets a classic white-pro-gentrifier Marty, who makes a statement about the neighborhood being a “blank canvas” with a plethora of possibilities, to which Penny rails back with a poignant speech on the literal erasure of the neighborhood and its systematic removal of working-class black people.

Halsey Street is an evocative and thought-provoking novel, one that will keep you thinking for days, and Coster is a fresh and talented voice. The writing complexity with a seemingly simple plot make this novel an absolute standout piece of literary fiction, and I’m looking forward to read more of her work in the future. Do not miss out on this one.