The Breaks
Julietta Singh, Coach House Books
The Breaks is a touching epistolary love song addressed to the writer’s six-year-old daughter, a multi-part letter envisioning a brighter future but grounded in the realities of race and parenthood. For the adult reader, the thesis is that through adopting children’s radical belief in unlimited possibilities, we can move forward with optimism, however uncertain things may be. Despite various looming political and ecological crises, Singh asks us to shed any inherited notions that do not serve us, and move instead along “revolutionary paths” to set us free. Tenderly, Singh takes us on a journey of the now, threading together the interlocking forces that threaten us individually and collectively: capitalist exploitation, climate disaster, the violent legacies of patriarchy, racism, and colonialism. Through her letters, though, Singh ultimately takes these truths home in this timely meditation on inheritance, race, and queer mothering at the end of the world.