The Half-White Album
Cynthia J. Sylvester
2023 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for best LGBTQ+ book.
This powerful debut collection explores lives lived between worlds.
Sylvester masterfully weaves together fiction, poetry, and nonfiction to give readers a poignant though fractured view of her characters’ lives, their loves, and their struggles. Told from the perspective of an urban Native, the work details a journey led by the nomadic band, the Covers. It is an experience meant to heal generational trauma and bring back into the light people who may otherwise be forgotten. At its heart, The Half-White Album is a healing ceremony of the author’s own creation, a process grounded in music that celebrates what it is to be human and imperfect and to love imperfectly.
Reviews
In short chapters that have a sense of urgency, family members grapple with residential schools and the erasure of their culture one day at a time. We see the impacts of these experiences while also getting to see Indigenous culture represented through a contemporary lens. Sylvester’s writing is emotionally driven and lyrical, making this a relevant and needed addition to the canon of writing from the American Southwest.
—BoDean Warnock, Booklist
This compelling debut collection explores liminal spaces, love, trauma and healing through poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Sylvester’s writing is radiant, the musicality is visceral and the voices are captivating and prismatic.
—Karla Strand, Ms. Magazine
The Half-White Album is a stunning powerhouse of literary music! Sylvester writes with deep heart and compassion, introducing us to characters we can’t help but love, even as they fall. Her lush, gorgeous language is a song that heals not only the story but also the reader.
—Mona Susan Power, author of A Council of Dolls
The Half-White Album is an astounding healing performance of soulful losses and strong-hearted connections within Diné families, friends, and a people. Told through a multitude of carefully curated genres, Cynthia Sylvester’s debut collection shares a song of restoration and grounding, of humor and tragedy, of ancestors and the individuals who live through them today.
—Natanya Ann Pulley, author of With Teeth
The beloved junk food of childhood has a place at the table with traditional native fare; mythic creatures share real estate with an angsty American teen; lyric intensity and witty wisecracks walk side by side. The elegant synthesis of these seeming contradictions is testament to the book’s success: its central archetypal character wrestles her way into a few different cultures that ostensibly have rejected her, and makes peace, and a life, of what she’s gathered. This is an enormously heartening read.
—Antonya Nelson, author of Funny Once: Stories
Watch an author talk hosted by the Mesa Public Library in Los Alamos.
$19.95 Paper
ISBN 9780826364715
184 pages, 5.5 x 8.5
$9.95 EPUB
ISBN 9780826364722
University of New Mexico Press
Lynn and Lynda Miller Southwest Fiction Series
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