Black Girl in Paris

Shay Youngblood's debut novel, Soul Kiss, received accolades from reviewers and writers alike. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution hailed it as "exquisite" while Tina McElroy Ansa called it "extraordinary . . . lyrical, intimate, funny, unsettling, enthralling." Now, in her second novel, Youngblood explores the endeavor of a creative coming-of-age, and infuses her story with the same mesmerizing, lush language and impressionistic style of her first remarkable work.

Black Girl in Paris wends its way around the mythology of Paris as a legendary hothouse for African-American artists. Like James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Josephine Baker, and Billie Holiday, Youngblood's heroine leaves the American South nurturing a dream of finding artistic emancipation in the City of Light. She experiments freely, inhabiting different incarnations -- artist's model, poet's helper, au pair, teacher, thief, and lover -- to keep body and soul together, to heal the wounds of her broken family and broken heart, to discover her sexual self, and to wrestle her dreams of becoming a writer into reality.

Youngblood's natural lyricism, as effortless as an inspired improvisation, and her respect for the tradition she depicts create a natural tension between old and new, reverence and innovation, and mark this novel as a worthy successor to her much-praised debut.