A review by veronicaouellette
Erasure by Percival Everett

5.0

This is by far my favorite novel I've ever read for school. It was assigned for an African American literature class last year, in my third year of university. The professor had this as the last reading for the class, and it's placement there was strikingly appropriate in the context of what we'd studied that semester. The themes of this novel made me go back and rethink all the prior readings we'd done. That being said, there is a lot of allusions (and poking fun at) other works by African American authors, so you definitely take more from the book if you have some knowledge of those texts - namely "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison and "The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man" by James Weldon Johnson. I don't know if I would have enjoyed Erasure quite as much as I did if I hadn't read those other works first.