The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is a behemoth (over 800 pages) epic (spanning three centuries) debut novel by award-winning poet Honoree Fanonne Jeffers. It’s a history of America from a Black perspective, a coming-of-age novel, and a family saga all rolled into one. The book is character-driven, intimate, and very readable. It has a number of plot lines and flashes back and forward decades and centuries, but it’s not hard to keep up with. It’s interesting how characters speak and act differently depending on whether White people are around or not, whether they’re in the city or country, live in the North or the South, are of one generation or another. The author calls it a work of historical fiction and “a Black feminist novel.” Reviewers uniformly call it the kind of book that only comes along once in a decade. Sections of the book are prefaced with passages from the work of Du Bois, hence the title, and the ideas and status of Du Bois also is the subject of discussion by various characters. A movie could never do it justice – you’d need a miniseries spread out over many seasons. Here’s what Kirkus Reviews says:
