Hold Love Strong by Matthew Aaron Goodman is an extraordinary novel for its voice, its vision, and its promise.  The voice is that of Abraham Singleton, born to a thirteen-year old girl and an absent twenty-year old father; the year is 1982 America and the place is the projects, Ever Park building in Queens, New York.  The vision is Goodman’s Singleton family, a realistic, full, and inspiring portrayal of what it takes to be a family and hold love strong amidst an environment that is relentless in its hopelessness, merciless in its dispensation of pain, and isolated behind walls of ignorance — not the ignorance of the inhabitants but of those on the outside, all those who live beyond the world of Ever Park and have no clue of what really goes on in the inner city, and even worse, do not really seem to care. The promise is that there are boys and girls who can survive places like Ever Park, through luck, through someone watching out for them, and through someone on the outside taking an interest in what goes on inside the neighborhood, and inside the hearts and minds of its inhabitants.

Abraham’s narration is genuine and clear; he is a boy we watch turn into a man and the process is painful, frustrating, awkward, and beautiful.  Abraham’s voice is one of conflicting emotions, uncertain status, threatened identity, and in turns hopeful and hopeless.  Paragraphs of questions underscore the uncertainty of Abraham’s life — “Who was she?  Who was this woman who so loved me while I slept yet was so uninterested in me when I was awake?  And which Abraham was I, the one my mother saw or the one my grandma knew; the one who needed to be scolded and coddled or the one who was deemed a man, albeit prematurely and without warrant?”; the questions that just keep coming, more and more questioning as Abraham grows from childhood into adulthood, questions that demonstrate the level of insecurity in terms of present needs (like food and medical care) and of future prospects (employment, health, family): “what chance do I have?”  Abraham wants to be a man but a man unlike the men he sees around him causing so much pain:”I had witnessed the damage other men caused and I didn’t want any part of being like the others, not their presence or absence.”

The most harrowing question posed, again and again, by Abraham and by the people of his community, is “What are the living supposed to do?….Should I cry out?…Should I demand to know why?  Do I plea for justice and peace?…I don’t know.” How to go on, when there is no future that can promise peace, sufficiency, stability?  Survival is through family (bonds of love), church (bonds of faith), or sadly, through escape via drugs that while destroying life, provide a buffer from pain and hopelessness that have become intolerable, or via mental illness, as seen in the character of Lindbergh, veteran of the Vietnam war and creator of magical helicopters to fly up and out of Ever Park.

Goodman creates a moving and unique relationship between Abraham and Donnell, the cousin who, although just five years older than Abraham, becomes his care giver, his protector, his touchstone, and his most faithful, believing, and exacting friend.  It is Donnell who must grow too soon into a man, and who skirts the line between what is legal and what is required for his family to survive; in the end, Donnell will be the one who blows his anger and frustration out in a game of basketball that is really a proclamation of worth, a manifestation of will, and a desperate bid for respect: “You leave it here.  Everything.  All the blood, sweat, tears.  Ain’t nothing that can stop you.”  When Abraham has to take stock of what his life has been and what he wants it to become, he recognizes the debt he owes to Donnell and the strength of the love he bears for him: it is a love that sustains Abraham as much as it sustains Donnell.

That is the strength of the hold of family love: it gives back as much as is given out. Love is the only lasting definite in the lives of the Singleton family, their existence  rife with transience (anyone could be shot dead at any time or hauled off to jail or just disappear into drugs) and uncertainty (lives, wasted and wasting, surround them).  But alongside the harrowing realities of daily life, love is the constant, whether it is the love of Donnell, protective and demanding; the love of Nice, so powerful that he cuts off all contact with his family when his own pain is too much for them to bear; the love of the grandmother, who does whatever it takes to keep the apartment and its inhabitants safe; the love of Aunt Rhonda, with her affectionate and obstinate pride in her family; or the love of Abraham’s mother, demonstrated through the care she takes of Abraham though she is still a child herself.  Love is a circle enveloping the Singleton family, even through its darkest hours of sorrow, hate, pain, and hopelessness.

Hold Love Strong is a powerful novel about one boy’s epic journey of survival against all odds.  That communities of insidious hopelessness, nonexistent opportunities, and failed political and civic promises exist is well-known and Hold Love Strong makes its truth a condemnation: communities of plenty are failing communities of need.  But Hold Love Strong is much more than a social commentary on failures of our society: it is a testament to the will to survive and to surpass. The book is fiction but every word of it rings true: in following its cycles of misery and possibility, of abandonment and connection, of loneliness and of brotherhood, we are all made witness to the enduring possibility — and our shared responsibility to foster that possibility — that any child can find wings and fly.

Reviewed by Nina Sankovitch, www.readallday.org

Published by Simon and Schuster - hardcover - 368 pages - $24.95