A bit too all over the place for me, yet somehow not quite bombastic enough.

I wanted to see the two stories intermeshed more than I thought they did.

this was a clever and biting satire that ultimately felt like a lot of potential left a bit unfulfilled for me! it felt it bit off more than it could chew at times, and the ending felt out of place and unsatisfying. i'll read more from this author!

A young writer, Kip, is given three weeks to write a book about E.M. Forster's love affair with an Egyptian man, Mohammed el Adl. Greenland explores Kip's experiences while writing the book and increasingly noticing striking similarities between real life and his subject matter, with the book weaving in and out of the two narratives and navigating the line between truth and fiction.

The book primarily follows Kip, who navigates the intersection of his identities as a gay black man, being educated in the UK, and living abroad while exploring the relationships with multiple men and grappling with what that means, both on a personal and broader historical and social levels. Being about a novelist writing about another novelist, this book naturally contains numerous literary references, providing literary context but also a wonderful list of book recommendations. In addition to the approachable writing style, this was also one of the reasons that the main character felt so realistic, and by the end of the book, felt like an old friend.

It's hard to believe that this is David Santos Donaldson's first novel. His voice is confident and clear. The pacing is on-point, and the overlap between the two storylines is expertly intertwined, giving even room for backstories that don't interrupt the narrative. The humor is often present while not being forced, even while talking about serious topics. Greenland was an absolute treat and will make any rereader happy by revealing new layers on every subsequent reading. I will be returning to the book and am looking forward to reading anything David Santos Donaldson comes out with in the future.

A rare instance where the cover is not more exciting than the book itself. This was a page turner for me. It may be a little too inside baseball about novel writing and the literary world at times, but I didn’t mind. I think some knowledge of author E. M. Forster would be good going into this book, but I don’t think it’s necessary since the book de-centers white colonial perspectives. That being said, I was surprised by some of the main character’s descriptions of “exotic” women. Perhaps this is meant to reflect some of his own limitations? This book deal with themes of racism, colonialism and intersectionality of queerness and Blackness. I would check trigger warning for this book and would not recommend it to everyone, but I found it to be a fantastic and thought provoking debut novel!

A masterpiece. Easily my favorite book of the year so far. The layers upon layers that Donaldson weaves into this narrative, the way he intertwines the queer past with the queer present—it's genius. This is a novel about being a writer and growing up in the shadow of colonization, about Blackness and queerness and language and what it means to have a voice to use it. Haunting, beautiful, incandescent. I will be thinking about it forever.

In Greenland, David Santos Donaldson offers us a central character, Kip (short for Kipling) Starling, whose sudden swings in moods and thinking reflect his experience living as a gay black writer in the U.S. in a longterm relationship with a white man, racing against a three-week deadline to rewrite a novelization of E.M. Forster's love affair Mohammed el Adl, a black man living in Egypt during the struggle for Egyptian independence, so that the novel is presented from el Adl's perspective rather than Forster's. And there's the part about locking himself in a basement and boarding up the door so he can't do anything but write, and the part about what turns out to be a journey to Greenland, though that isn't the destination he was originally headed toward. Also, what may or may not be hallucinations.

To say that Greenland is not a tidy novel would be an immense understatement. But that's the point. Kip is struggling to live fully as himself in a society determined not to see him clearly and only minimally interested in what he has to say as a writer. Not tidy. Chaos.

This makes for a novel that is demanding of its readers. As you'll see if you peruse the reviews for Greenland, some show readers embracing Greenland's chaos, appreciating its complicated truths and contradictions, and some show other readers walking away from the novel and the demands it makes upon them. I'm not trying to depict a dichotomy here between "good" readers who get the novel and "bad" readers who don't. I'm just saying that either you'll find the payoff from reading Greenland sufficient or you won't.

At times, I did experience reading Greenland as work—but I also experienced it as revelatory with a breadth of vision that challenged me to see Kip's world in totality, rather than just letting me take a stroll down one of the many trajectories he travels simultaneously. If you share my literary inclinations, you'll be carrying this novel along inside yourself for a long time to come, turning bits and pieces over in your mind and exploring all the different ways they can be put together.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own.

There was a lot I liked about this book: a story within a story, the history, the discourse on racism as almost an intermission within the book, and many of the characters themselves. However, I could have done without all the sex. And there is a lot of it. I also started to get lost as Kip got closer to Greenland. Is that a way to make the reader feel as unmoored as Kip was? This is where the story lost me. It felt like the author wasn't sure where the story was going, floundered around a bit, and then when it came to the ending it felt rather unfinished and abrupt. Maybe a little extra editing and revising would have resulted in a more enjoyable book for me?

Real Rating: 4.25* of five, rounded down for a few stylistic infelicities

I don't think anyone on Earth could've wanted to love this book more than I did. I'm in an intergenerational Black/white gay relationship. I am the very epitome of this debut novel's audience!

And here's the four-plus-star review to tell you why; and where it fell short for me.

Start with the pace. Kip(ling, as in the white Empire apologist) is Black, his lover...a strange hybrid of presence and absence...is white. Kip's main focus in the novel he needs to write in three weeks to meet his deadline is E.M. Forster's Black Egyptian lover, Mohammed's, treacherous path to being with an older white man. That needs set-up...but almost the first quarter of the book? It was drawn-out and in view of the excitement potential of this tale of discovery and personal growth through identification with Otherness, sapped the energy out of the tale for this reader.

Next, the sexuality...I am a lifelong admirer of and votary to the phallus, but good gravy, the erections and the spontaneous orgasms in here are, um, over the top. You should forgive. I'm also, as a survivor of maternal incest, permaybehaps a bit oversensitive to the juxtaposition of sexuality and those who really should be too young for such to occur to them. I accept, though, that this isn't done by the author for a lascivious purpose but as a fact of a certain kind of life. Still squicked me out.

But the core, the beating heart of the book, is the quest to be one's own power, to set one's own course, when Black and Other. Ben (Kip's lover) wants badly to be supportive, yet can't help but be a force for assimilation. No one white can help that. It's a fact of racist society...that we exist in our privilege is enough for us to exert metaphysical gravity towards that end. The fact that Mohammed is in love with a man of great public eminence means he's under even greater assimilationist pressures. And let's face it, the assimilation can never be complete or seamless. One's skin color is not subject to change.

Kip's literary efforts are to deliver an acceptable manuscript. To a publisher, white. Who might, or might not, care to read, sign, publish his work...he has to do this. And he's got his companion, Mohammed, in his semblance of ever-increasing corporeality, as a guide, a distraction, a hectoring nuisance of a muse. Upstairs, he's got his loving, exasperated, uncomprehending white lover Ben.

This is the way we're going to go...through the hard, scary, fiercely fought battlefields of love and relationship and the deep dependence we all have on the illusion of the world we carry in our heads. Ben's illusions about marriage to the creative and exciting Kip didn't include the hard, slogging reality of living with a writer's frequent descents into insanity. Kip's fantasy of the way white privilege works was that it was transitive, like so many other senses of the verb "to screw". One of them, dear Kip, is "to screw <I>over</i>" and that is what Kip's fears and senses are telling him is happening. His embodied Blackness in Mohammed, the muse and weirdly corporeal fantasy, is there to tell him how getting screwed is only fun if it's not "over," and that's what the white men they truly love are inevitably going to do.

Well, there's something in that...there's no relationship that has perfect parity of partners, and there's a lot fewer relationships that have both Black and white men in them that get too close to that fantasy of parity. It's a tough enough thing to get the whole world's ideas about men in love with each other..."who's the woman? is what they say about Black men true?"...out of your bed, then you've got to get it out of your head. That's where things just crash for most people I've known who are in these relationships. Ben and Kip are separated by the powerful pull of ease.

Ben's crash comes while Kip's at his most vulnerable, and his most destructive. Ben looks into the void of Kip's unfillable maw of need, validation and identity and control and power and acceptance and love, and realizes "I can't do that...I can't be that." This being the nature of intimate relationships, Kip simply stalls out when he is Seen and abandoned on the existential level by the man he wanted to save him. Mohammed, the fantasy of Blackness and betrayed Otherness, and Kip have to make a run for it, or else be consumed into invisibiliy.

These struggles are, I suppose it pays to say out loud here, basic human ones. They're not different for different people, no matter their manifold other oppositions. What they represent is the endless, victoryless battle to be better at being yourself in a world that does not care in the tiniest degree about you. And what Kip must do is see that battle through. What makes his battle relatable, we've established in its basics. What makes it unique is Kip's thriving, driving need to create. And Ben? He isn't there in that battle. So Kip's on the field by himself. With Mohammed's fantastical, corporeal shade. That betrayed and abandoned, bitterly wounded, foully abused Black body is what Kip's life needs to incorporate because it is the very center of his Jungian Selfness.

The final scenes of <I>Greenland</i>, taking place with Black men in cold, searing whiteness, are some of the most profound explications of the Union of the Self I've ever read. And, faithful to Chekhov's gun rule, the ending of the novel is the end. The true end.

Remember, though, that all endings are also beginnings.

This book is a fascinating exercise in combining the story of the author and the story that the author is writing into one narrative. Chapters shift back and forth between the author's perspective and the narrative of the novel he is writing. At a few points, in the beginning, I was a little confused but everything made sense pretty quickly after and I was able to sink into the plot and the characters. This book is a powerful meditation on race and sexuality and mental health. Do not miss this one!

Wow. This is an author to watch. Bravo! This is a novel about so much and the author brilliantly weaves themes about lgbtqia+ and being seen for who you are. It took me a couple of chapters to get immersed - don’t give up! Fascinating and lovely and challenging - in the best way. I finished and immediately thought what a great book discussion group choice this would make. Much to discuss, discover, and relish. Thanks to Amistad for the advanced copy. Im so glad I read this.

I'm incredibly disappointed that I didn't enjoy this book. I had to stop reading at about the 40% mark because it was mentally painful to pick it up again and try to push through. I can tell this author had a lot to say and a story to tell. But several things killed this for me:
- it took far too long to story. 20% of the way in and there is still just a man talking to himself and continuing to remind the reader that he "needs to get to the story about Mohammad and Forster". If it takes a quarter of the book to set up what the book will be, you've lost me.
- It's indigestible. Is this a struggling author fighting to find his voice? a hidden gem of a story about a secret lover? a critical look at racism and nationalism then and now? a look into the intersectionality of race and sexuality through time? It can be all these things with the right storyteller, but it didn't work here.
- The repeated and graphic juxtaposition of erections and spontaneous orgasms in the same section as casual mentions of child rape made me nauseous.

In all, I don't feel the need to push myself through more of this when it's not working for me. Many readers will love this story and the journey both Kip and Mohammad make, but I cannot.

**Thank you NetGalley and Amistad for the eARC**

Greenland is the captivating and unusual story of Kip, a Black queer author who has three weeks to write a book about the secret love affair E.M. Forster had with Mohammed el Adl.

The book starts when Kip locks himself in the basement for three weeks. He badly wants to be a published author, and if he can write the story from Mohammed’s point of view, he’ll be offered a contract. While trying to write the story, Kip often gets distracted. He looks at his own life, the choices he made and how Mohammed handled things.
 
At first, I found it a bit difficult to get into the story, but I couldn't stop reading after a few chapters. In this fascinating book, David Santos Donaldson seamlessly interweaves Kip’s and Mohammed’s lives. Both men have so much in common, they’re Black, queer, and are in a relationship with white men. But this story is about more. It’s about the cost of friendship, the role that books and poems (by Walt Whitman) play in their lives, and most of all, it’s about being seen. Truly being seen. Kip’s reason why he wants to publish his book so badly touched me. As a Black, gay man, he needs the world to say, I see you. You matter. I know you exist.

Greenland is an honest and sometimes raw book. A refreshing read, and I highly recommend this story!

I didn’t realize how much I needed a novel like this. It’s been a long time since I finished a book that left me feeling better about myself and feeling better about humankind, with a renewed optimism that I, like everyone, have a place and purpose that comes just by being, not necessarily from any role I play in the world. Many themes run through this novel, one of which is the importance of being seen, really and authentically seen, by another and somehow Donaldson managed to leave me, as the reader, with that feeling by the end of the book. I felt seen.

So, wow – what an adventure of a story. Kipling is a Black British ex-pat living in the U.S. and trying to get his novel on E.M. Forster and Mohammed, Forster’s Black Egyptian boyfriend, published. Faced with a publishing deadline 3 weeks hence, he has barricaded himself in the basement of his home in an effort to force himself to re-work his manuscript from the unique perspective of Mohammed rather than Forster. Searching for Mohammed’s voice to tell his story, Kipling undertakes (or undergoes) an unflinching examination of his own life.

That's not quite right. He flinches quite often and that's part of the wonderfully creative tension in the story - Kipling learning to see himself, learning to see others seeing him.

Beginning a story with the main character barricaded in a basement may not seem like a promising adventure but trust me, you will be a well-traveled reader by the novel's end and also a well-read reader. Donaldson weaves in quotes from novelists and poets, largely from the English canon, that serve to teach, guide and steady Kipling on his harrowing emotional, and literal, journey.

Are there elements of magical realism in this novel? I guess that depends on one's perspective on what is real and what is illusory. In Kipling's journey, Donaldson quite brilliantly shows the reality of the amorphous boundaries of space and time.

This will be an excellent book club choice especially, but not exclusively, for groups focused on reading the Black experience and LGBTQ+ experience.

"You become real. When that dimension emerges from within you, it also draws it forth from within the other person. Ultimately, of course, there is no other and you are always meeting yourself. " -Eckhart Tolle

Who would have thought the above quote could be so ably transposed into novel form?

A heartfelt thank you to the author for writing #Greeland and to #NetGalley and #HarperCollins for the electronic ARC.

This novel has a lot going on here. There is much to say about assimilation and it is interesting how the life of EM Forester was woven into this story. Very unusual and one that will stick with me long after the last page.