Blue Hour

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What is motherhood in the midst of uncertainty, buried trauma and an unravelling America
What it's always been - a love song.

Our narrator is a gifted photographer, an uncertain wife, an infertile mother, a biracial woman in an America that's coming undone. As she grapples with a lifetime of ambivalence about motherhood, yet another act of police brutality makes headlines, and this time the victim is Noah, a boy in her photography class.

Unmoored by the grief of a recent, devastating miscarriage and Noah's fight for his life, she worries she can no longer chase the hope of having a child, no longer wants to bring a Black body into the world. Yet her husband Asher - contributing white Jewish genes alongside her Black-Japanese ones to any potential child - is just as desperate to keep trying.

Throwing herself into a new documentary on motherhood and making secret visits to Noah in the hospital, this is when she learns she is, impossibly, pregnant. As life shifts once more, she must decide what she dares hope for the shape of her future to be.

Reviews

Full of musings, debate, anger, distress and yet, ultimately, hope, Blue Hour is incredibly powerful -- Zibby Owens * Good Morning America *
Gasp-worthy . . . How did Harrison achieve this spectacular feat of emotional withholding while also making readers feel so much -- J. Howard Rosier * Vulture *
It's an urgent, heartbreaking, and profound meditation on motherhood, art-making, uncertainty, the ongoing violence of American racism and police brutality, and the courage it takes to choose the future -- Laura Sackton * BuzzFeed *
In lyrical language, Harrison skillfully explores the complex tensions that gnaw at the expectant mother [...] and offers an intimate view of the couple's pain. This signals the arrival of a brave new writer * Publishers Weekly *
In a world full of demands and distractions, Blue Hour asks us to pause and sit with our grief. Challenging, intimate, and relevant, this novel is a meditation on the boundaries of hope -- Osa Atoe, author of Shotgun Seamstress