BOOK REVIEW

"Hold Love Strong" a powerful, evocative tale
"Hold Love Strong," By Matthew

 

 

 

 

 

Aaron Goodman.Touchstone, $24.99.

 

 

 

 

 

Abraham Singleton's mother's addiction to crack leaves her dead, facedown and with bullets through her skull. Abraham's uncle, a local basketball star and hero to the kids of the Ever Park housing project, lives for years in incarceration for handling drugs. His father is absent, and everyone near young Abraham seems perilously close to falling over the slippery edge of poverty, violence and drug addiction that so many others have fatally tumbled over before.

Somehow, in this debut novel, "Hold Love Strong," author Matthew Aaron Goodman becomes his protagonist, an African American boy born to a 13-yearold in the bathroom of a New York City housing project apartment. A testament to the author's creativity, the novel reads more as a memoir than fiction.

The familiar characters — the doomed but aspirational young men who turn to drug dealing for fast cash, the worndown, churchgoing matriarchs, the gifted son who makes it to college — have been seen before, but it is the book's depth of understanding and deft lyricism that make "Hold Love Strong" come alive where comparable books have not. Abraham's struggle gle i is not just to escape Ever Park, it is a struggle to b believe, despite the daily proof against it, that a be better life for his family mig might exist; it is a hope that is pinned to his college lege acceptance letter.

A As much a loving testimony tim to the venerable Gra Gran, the young grandmother mo who binds Abraham's ha family together wi with a love "greater than an anything presented by th the Bible, the Torah and th the Quran combined," A Abraham's telling of his sto story is an evocative, fullcolor l ifh portrait of the hearts broken countless times by the cruelty of poverty, and of how those hearts are ever-repaired by the love of family and the tiniest — but most powerful — of hopes. ¦