Inside Blue Hour
Your inside look at Blue Hour…
Here you’ll find what inspires the characters’ lives, surrounds them, contributes to who they are as people. But first, introductions:
Main character: Black (Haitian) and Japanese, married her husband, Asher, after a few short months, at the courthouse wearing a white long-sleeve mini dress and Dr. Martens; photographer with a penchant for the odd and overlooked, teaches photography classes to youth in an old food truck refurbished into a mobile dark room. Likes: pancakes with the edges slightly burnt and crispy, dark humor, vintage jewelry boxes, noise. Hiccups profusely when she’s nervous.
Asher: married to main character, white Jewish, tie designer who owns a men’s boutique in Brooklyn, married main character in a floral print burgundy suit, can only sew to one of Chopin’s nocturnes, deeply romantic, collects picture frames abandoned on the sidewalk, drives a Triumph (motorcycle). Former line cook, learned to sew in Hamburg. Likes: reading the classics, bourbon in his pancake syrup, cooking authentic international dishes. Voice goes up an octave when he’s nervous (he hates it).
Art in their home
Music On Repeat
Currently Bingeing: The Bear, Atlanta
Always Reading
Restaurants they love
About Blue Hour
What is motherhood in the midst of uncertainty, buried trauma, and an unraveling America? What it’s always been—a love song
Our narrator is a gifted photographer, an uncertain wife, an infertile mother, a biracial woman in an unraveling America. As she grapples with a lifetime of ambivalence about motherhood, yet another act of police brutality makes headlines, and this time the victim is Noah, a boy in her photography class. Unmoored by the grief of a recent devastating miscarriage and Noah’s fight for his life, she worries she can no longer chase the hope of having a child, no longer wants to bring a Black body into the world. Yet her husband Asher—contributing white, Jewish genes alongside her Black-Japanese ones for any potential child—is just as desperate to keep trying. Throwing herself into a new documentary on motherhood, and making secret visits to Noah in the hospital, this when she learns she is, impossibly, pregnant. As the future shifts once again, she must decide yet again what she dares hope for the shape of her future to be. Fearless, timely, blazing with voice, Blue Hour is a fragmentary novel with unignorable storytelling power.