Joy is not decoration here. It is equipment.

The house on Annette Street is a rented shotgun double where nobody has a door that locks and nobody expects one. His grandmother is Mémère to the family and Miss Lu to the block. Monday is red beans because Monday was wash day. From June to November the hurricane tracking map lives on the refrigerator, and beside the stove there is a drawer with the candles in it, and every house on that street has the same drawer in the same place, and the whole city knows the drill.

Dell learns the shade map of his block before he learns to read. He is let into a chief's sewing room because he is quiet and useful, and hands over beads for years, and understands exactly whose tradition it is and that it is not his. He watches a boy four doors down get shot for a taillight, and nine days later his mother teaches him the rules at a kitchen table without once using the word afraid. Then the water comes, and the paperwork after it, and an arithmetic that pays less for the same house on his block than it would on another.

A first novel about a Black Creole family in the Seventh Ward, told across forty years by a man who never left the parish until the city broke and a job appeared nine hundred miles north. It is about ground that is not entirely committed to being ground, about what a recipe means in a family that never owned anything, and about the specific competence of people who built their own infrastructure because the public one was a coin flip.