I was not familiar with the author before reading this and am very glad to have found her work. Her writing is immersive and powerful. There is quite a lot of Christian scripture throughout that ties into the theme of that essay. She includes ads that ran while she was growing up next to essays about what it was like to be a dark-skinned Black girl with kinky hair in the Barbie/Christie era. She also gives a window into what it was like to grow up with a mentally ill mother as well as all the micro- and macro-aggressions she endured as the only Black student in a white school.

What a collection of writing. Marcie Alvis Walker gives us Incredibly gorgeous, vivid prose that draws you right into the middle of each scene and then unfolds in multiple dimensions around you. I feel like I KNOW the people she describes. And the even-keeled way she addresses both mundane details and heartbreaking shifts and changes is some of the best I’ve read.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing a copy of this book.

In Everybody Come Alive Marcie Alvis Walker writes about being a lover of Black literature but never being able to find a particular type of story. And so she tells us a particular type of Black family story- her story. Growing up with affluent grandparents after her mother dropped her off and left, she never understood if she was being abandoned or if her mother would eventually come back for her. In her mother's eyes, she was better left in the care of her grandparents with the ability to attend predominately white schools with better funding.

The opening of the memoir starts with a childhood memory of a white man walking into Marcie's church congregation and disrupting the harmony of worship. A reflection on the way unknown intentions can leave us wondering if we are still safe in our own bodies and in our own communities. There is a thread throughout the essays herein contained that explore the pain of never feeling seen or relishing in the comfort and ease that comes with belonging.

The way Marcie writes about her mother is both painful and beautiful, reflective of all the ways daughters admire our mothers for both their strengths and their imperfect humanity. Her mother was God enough to survive a freak train accident but not to escape the voices in her head and there stands Marcie baring witness to it all.

The advertisements in between essays are portals back in time displaying the way media portrays blackness adjacent to the way blackness felt in Marcie's experience. Biblical references throughout the storytelling and holy moments told through metaphorical narrative remind us that what trauma teaches us can be sacred, too.

Thank you to the author and publisher for the e-arc copy!