The Coldest Winter Ever*

* Quotations from this book may contain sexual language

This hip-hop novel by Sister Souljah is one of those books that gets passed from reader to reader. It is one of those books that you can't put down until you are finsihed with it. When I taught at Touro College, a New York City school, I always saw students devouring the book. I could recognize that pink and purple cover from across a subway platform. I am surprised it took me so long to finally get around to reading it. So, can a white girl like me who came up in Dallas, Texas get into this book? Absolutely.

NUTSHELL: Winter Santiaga is fifteen going on thirty, a sophisticated street-wise daughter of the local drug king of her Brooklyn projects. We enter her story as everything is starting to unravel for her Pops. Winter, used to a life of protection and privilege, is forced out of her comfort zone when her mother is shot and her father is jailed. She is scrappy, using all of her powers (including sexuality and predatory manipulation) to get back to a position of pampered princess-ness, but her thirst for status and luxury ends up sucking her into the same trap that snared her beloved father and eventually lands her in the slammer as well, having lost all of her friends and family along the way.

My favorite thing about this novel is the language. Some might say it is written in slang or ghetto english. Personally, i find this colorful community dialect beautiful, and satisfying in it's attention to rhythm and cadence. I like the way Sister Souljah spells things in a way that lets me hear the voices speaking. She uses "tryna" for "trying to," for example. The language is gritty, raw, visceral. Experiences are registered in the body. In an early scene, Winter describes herself in a club "tryna" get the attention of a man who dismisses her: "My body was shaking and sweating as anger and desire fought it out." Later that same man called her name "with a roughness that made me want to just hop on his dick and go buck." Winter's lack of shame combined with the intensity of feeling regarding her physical attitudes is at once bracing and unbelievable. I remember being fifteen and feeling unbearably conflicted about my sexual urges and feelings. But this character has grown up in a world that required her to be much older than her years. She has grown up in a world where mortality is an every day fact. I wonder if Sister Souljah's portrayal of this product of the street drug world is accurate. I would now like to read a memoir by someone like Winter, but real.

But back to that sentence above, that hot sentence ..."hop on his dick and go buck." Listen to those consonants. Those short, hard words that skip like a rock over a pond. this is what i love about this book.
I also really like using the word "bounce" for leave.

So, I gotta bounce. later.