Black Cake

You cannot win, Byron is fond of telling his school-aged audiences looking to him for motivation and inspiration, if you don’t play. Covey is first introduced as a long-distance open-ocean swimmer. As a teenager, she drew strength and courage from challenging, long, and empty stretches of the sea around her Caribbean island, cutting over powerful waves and knifing through riptides. Her friend Bunny will find her identity later in life as a champion long-distance open-ocean swimmer, celebrated for tackling some of the most treacherous and lengthiest stretches of water on four different continents.

The novel parallels the strength, courage, independence, and tenacity open-ocean swimming requires to the virtue of endurance that emerges in the novel’s most heroic characters. Despair is not in the DNA of Covey or her family. When times are most pressing and the horizon most distant—when Lin watches helplessly as his shop burns to the ground; when Benny understands she will not stay in school because of her sexual orientation; when Covey, in the days following the train accident, comes to understand the implications of her “death”; when later Covey must sign over her daughter for adoption; when Byron understands his race will forever prevent him from career success in the oceanographic institute he loves—when, in short, surrender would be the simplest and most logical choice, the characters tap into hope.