The Names of All the Flowers: A Memoir

Set in rapidly gentrifying 1990s Oakland, this memoir--"poignant, painful, and gorgeous" (Alicia Garza)--explores siblinghood, adolescence, and grief in a family shattered by loss.

Melissa and her older brother Junior grow up running around the disparate neighborhoods of 1990s Oakland, two of six children to a white Quaker father and a black Southern mother. But as Junior approaches adolescence, a bullying incident and later a violent attack in school leave him searching for power and a sense of self in all the wrong places; he develops a hard front and falls into drug dealing. Right before Junior's twentieth birthday, the family is torn apart when he is murdered as a result of gun violence.

The Names of All the Flowers connects one tragic death to a collective grief for all black people who die too young. A lyrical recounting of a life lost, Melissa Valentine's debut memoir is an intimate portrait of a family fractured by the school-to-prison pipeline and an enduring love letter to an adored older brother. It is a call for justice amid endless cycles of violence, grief, and trauma, declaring: "We are all witness and therefore no one is spared from this loss."

"Valentine's heartfelt memoir of losing her brother expresses the grief of being a black woman left behind when a black man dies to gun violence, and the specific condition of growing up mixed race in Oakland. As such, it's a portrait of a place, a person who died too young, the systems that led to that death, and the keen insights of the author herself. Lyrical and smart, with appropriate undercurrents of rage." --Emily Raboteau, author of Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora

Binding Type: Paperback
Author: Valentine, Melissa
Published: 07/14/2020
Publisher: Feminist Press
ISBN: 9781936932856
Pages: 296
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.50w x 0.70d