Perfect Peace

Perfect Peace




I LOVED Perfect Peace by Daniel Black. It’s one of the best books I’ve read this year. The story is set in a small black farming town in Arkansas and begins in 1940. All the residents have known each other all their lives. Perfect, and I promise you I’m not ruining the suspense by telling this part (it’s in the description of the story on Amazon), is the 7th child born to a woman who’s already had 6 boys. Emma Jean is DYING for a lil girl… DYING. She’s had a horrible childhood at the hands of her mother and all she wants in life is to have her own daughter to show her mother how it’s supposed to be done. But she doesn’t. She has another boy. And she then decides that NOPE…she is GOING to have a DAUGHTER. And so she names her son Perfect, and she presents him as a girl to the world, and to himself. That decision is so thought-provoking, I had to stop reading for a minute to form my own hypothesis as to what the rest of the story would be like. Does what you perceive as your gender really matter that much? If you’re a boy and your mom tells you that you’re a girl and you’re raised as a girl, how does it effect your sexuality? Should it?

The center of this novel is of course Perfect (later to be Paul,) and his struggles with his mother’s decision. But there is also the story of each son, and the story of Perfect/Paul’s parents. And that part is what drew me in. The brothers are so different. They deal with their mother’s trickery differently, but they all confront it in their own way, and they’re each made to be so endearing in different ways. We follow each boy from the time that Perfect/Paul is born until the paths they choose as men. And each is admirable in their own way.

The husband and father, Gus, is a sensitive but simple man. The book opens with a ritual that he performs every year that is at first perplexing, but after reading Black's insightful description of it, I felt Gus' need for it. It's something we probably all should do.

It doesn’t help that Perfect is being raised in an impossibly small town. EVERYONE knows everyone and everyone knows Perfect was a girl who is now a boy. You can only imagine people's attitude towards him. They were envious of him as a girl but now mock him as a boy.

And of course there's Paul's struggle with what's been done to him. You feel every moment of it.

Emma Jean is also made to deal with what she's done. Her attitude at first is very indifferent, but eventually all that she's done, not just to Paul, but to her entire family, smacks her in the face.

Perfect Peace confronts sexuality, gender identity, and plain humanity head on, but in a non-conventional way. The writing was excellent. I thought about the characters long after I finished the book. This is the first book I’ve read by Black, and I’ll definitely be on the lookout for his others.