Blue Hour

 By: Tiffany Clarke Harrison

Location: FIC HAR

Genre: Contemporary Literary Fiction. Obama Read

Blue Hour is on President Obama’s best of 2023 and deservedly so. This is a compact book at only 130 pages; Harrison makes every word count. Brutal and in your face making you see the world as it really is, and heartbreaking and tender and making you thankful for the moments of beauty that life offers to try to counter its pain.
Our unnamed narrator is a bi-racial woman, someone who is having great difficulty maintaining a pregnancy, struggling with terrible loss in her family, trying to make a living as an artist, to work her way through insurmountable grief. Harrison creates a very intimate portrait, letting us see the raw, ragged life with all its anguish and possibilities for joy and connection.

What is motherhood in the midst of uncertainty, buried trauma, and an unraveling America? What it’s always been—a love song.

Our narrator is a gifted photographer, an uncertain wife, an infertile mother, a biracial woman in an unraveling America. As she grapples with a lifetime of ambivalence about motherhood, yet another act of police brutality makes headlines, and this time the victim is Noah, a boy in her photography class. Unmoored by the grief of a recent devastating miscarriage and Noah’s fight for his life, she worries she can no longer chase the hope of having a child, no longer wants to bring a Black body into the world. Yet her husband Asher—contributing white, Jewish genes alongside her Black-Japanese ones for any potential child—is just as desperate to keep trying. Throwing herself into a new documentary on motherhood, and making secret visits to Noah in the hospital, this when she learns she is, impossibly, pregnant. As the future shifts once again, she must decide yet again what she dares hope for the shape of her future to be. Fearless, timely, blazing with voice, Blue Hour is a fragmentary novel with unignorable storytelling power.