[.uk] The Color Midnight Made : A Novel (ISBN 0743439929)

Innocence and Truth:
Conrad Clay, the ten-year-old protagonist of "The Color Midnight Made" is the center of his own universe...one that's slowly but inexorably going to pieces. Growing up white in a predominantly black area of San Francisco isn't easy--but "Con" is adaptable and trusting. Perhaps too trusting. As he watches his family crumble, and his relationship with his best buddy "Loop" (a derivative of "Froot Loops")grow distant, Con moves through the world like a lost soul. Andrew Winer has created a character in Conrad equal to Holden Caulfield--a rebellious, naive and innocent young man searching for truth. "The Color Midnight Made" is darkly poetic, moving, and wonderfully told. This is a story that stays in your mind long after you've finished reading it.

Good book:
I enjoyed this book. It reminded me of some aspects of my own childhood (parents not getting along, father getting drunk and swearing, feeling alone in the world, unhappy about family life). At first I thought it was a bit slow but then it picked up (not too far into it) and never lost my attention after that. The author keeps an even pace between hardship and humor so one does not get depressed reading the book. The part I remember the most (and still gives me a chuckle) is when Conrad is in church (forced to go my his mother who does not attend with him). Apparently the church choir is predominately white (if not all white) and a black church choir comes to visit. Conrad is bored and not very interesetd in the strained singing of the white church choir but when the black church choir comes in with their own unique way it makes Conrad sit up and pay attention and he thinks to himself "We have a situation!" If you didn't get a chuckle out of that you'll have to read the book and see how the author described it. It is poignant. I recommend this book. It is an easy and relativly fast read. I loaned it to my 15-year-old nephew. He has to do several book reports for school and needs something that he can read that isn't too long. I felt this was a good balance between not too long but would also hold his attention and be a pleasure to read.

A Moving Modern Coming of Age Novel:
I met the author of this novel, who spent much time in New York City, and writes with the passion of experience and the knowledge of life in the streets. The hero of this novel is a young white man living in a primarily black community in a shipyard town near San Francisco. He goes from foster home to foster home and attends Christian churches attended by blacks. While its about identity, its also about friendship (he befriends a blind man who draws a new color thats symbolic of the soul). It's also about tolerance, humanity and a boy's journey into manhood. It's a modern coming of age novel. It's well-written and soulful. Dickens, while not in an obvious way, directly influenced some of the characteristics- the waif who is taken in by a "family" and taught good values. The book is very modern and contains language that is very realistic and down-to-earth, like its tone. I look forward to a sequel if it is ever written.

Contemporary take on Huckleberry Finn with a few flaws:
I'm sure Winer had various influences when writing this novel, but it strikes me as a contemporary reworking of Huckleberry Finn. Like Huck, Conrad Clay has a broken home and alcoholic father, resists the conformity of school and organized religion, and tells "whoppers" sometimes but is essentially good at heart, with the gift of feeling sympathy for others. Most importantly, he has a real connection to African-American culture; in fact, one wonders if Winer wrote this novel in light of the discovery that Twain may have modeled Huck's speech on that of black children. Conrad is able to move between cultural worlds and draws emotional sustenance from a nearby black family (in this, Winer reverses stereotypes, as it's the white family that is dysfunctional). The strengths of this novel, then, are its dialogue (the various speech-patterns of the East Bay, CA community) and a well-developed moral viewpoint. Regarding this latter strength, Jane Smiley, Wendell Berry, and others have argued that Twain's major fault was an individualistic desire to escape from community, instead of responsibly attempting to solve social problems. Generally speaking, there will be no "lighting out for the territory" for the young narrator, and without giving away the plot, I'll just say that the novel is a bildungsroman that involves Conrad's growing awareness of, and sympathy for, the problems of others in the community. That said, the novel has some flaws that keep me from recommending it without reservation. I think Winer over-idealizes childhood and the black community at times. Sometimes the childish, innocent things Conrad does are a little cloying, too "TV Movie of the Week." Meanwhile, his surrogate family is very multicultural-for example, it includes a (...) couple-and it felt, as much as I hate to use this term, a little "politically correct." To the extent that Winer endorses a "Well, we may not make much money, but we get by for all that" viewpoint, he can be said to minimize the very real and serious effects of economic inequality upon black families. Most seriously, in my view, Winer never really figured out just how old Conrad was. We often get physical descriptions and accounts of events that sound like they're coming from a much older person. For example, in the opening pages the narrator says "Streetdust soaked up oilspots under buzzing telephone lines, which sagged low and heavy from too many people talking through them." This is a clever description, but I'm just not sure a fifth-grader, even a genius poet in the making, would use figurative language in that way. This fluctuation in Conrad's mental age sometimes causes a discordance in the plot. There's one point, for example (I'll try to phrase this ambiguously, but if you're worried about spoilers, you might want to stop reading here) where it's clearly indicated that Conrad (a) knows what adultery is and (b) takes a certain physical object in a neighbor's house as an indicator of whether or not adultery is happening in his own environment. Yet later in the book, Conrad suddenly seems blissfully ignorant, and when there's a confrontation, Conrad is trying hard to figure it all out: "I still wasn't sure exactly what was going on," he thinks. Now, this is a time when an author should *show*, not *tell*: if Conrad really is too young to know what's going on, that should be apparent in the way Winer narrates the story through Conrad's perspective. If Winer has to actually make his character think, "I still wasn't sure exactly what was going on," that betrays a certain insecurity on Winer's part as to the mental age of his character. This problem wasn't big enough to keep me from enjoying the book, but I didn't believe in Conrad quite as fully as I believe in the reality of Huck Finn. In sum, this book is well worth ordering through Amazon because of its sharp dialogue, vivid rendering of a community, and clear moral perspective. However, I also think that Winer's next novel will be much better.

A good read:
This book is interesting and a good read. Characters in the book are well developed throughout the story and create a sense of reality for the reader. I would highly recommend those who read this book to read the whole book at once so they don't forget important details throughout the story and grasp the full meaning of this book.