Get Down: Stories

by Asali Solomon

Book Overview

Asali Solomon's characters are vivid misfits-a heathen at Jesus camp, a scheming prep-school student, a middle-aged mom pining for her salsa-dancing salad days, a scheming twentysomething virgin, a college stud in love with his weight-lifting partner, a lonely girl in love with a yellow dress. The kids inGet Downare trapped between their own good breeding and their burning desire to join the house party of sex, romance, and bad behavior that seems...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374299420
• ISBN13: 9780374299422
• Release Date: October 2006
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 194 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.9" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

I remember these times all too well

As an awkward black girl who went to a private school attended by very few girls who looked like me, I know these stories all too well. Not quite knowing where or how to fit in, immersing yourself in one environment by day and then returning to a rough neighborhood after your last class at 3pm, struggling to be down without getting pregnant or putting yourself in physical danger...Solomon understands. I even teared up a bit when reading Star of a Story. This book breaks your heart...in that good way.

Detailed and True

This is one sly, deft, funny, and truly moving collection of stories. Solomon has great grace as a stylist and as a chronicler of interior lives. I read the book in one sitting and blushed with recognition and empathy for her deeply realized characters. I also laughed out loud at the wit that studs the entire collection. You're going to love it.

Heartbreaking and funny, sometimes at the same time

If you're looking for stories that will make you laugh and ache in sympathy in equal measure, then get started reading right away. Get Down is filled with characters who will earn your love even as they make decisions that will have you talking out loud to them while you're reading, trying to keep them from doing things you know are only going to make their lives harder, which will get embarrassing if you're not by yourself. It won't bother you if you're alone, though, because they seem so real that it won't seem strange to think that maybe if you talk loud enough they might listen to you, even if you know you won't be able stop them. A highly impressive debut from someone to keep an eye on.

Sublime Debut

Get Down should be required reading for anyone who's ever felt slightly out of place--a bit too smart, too fat, too black, too white--but who's just not sure if s/he should let on. Solomon's capaciously human characters try, and almost succeed, at concealing their secret, shameful squareness: their hopeless nostalgia, their utterly futile crushes, their nerdy earnestness. It is precisely this slightly out-of-sync quality that makes Solomon's characters so captivating. No description, no matter how elaborately hyphenated the adjectives, could ever pidgeonhole them. Because Solomon's wit is so dead-pan, her characters so young, readers might almost just miss her stories' gut wrenching insights into love, adolescence, and identity. The number of times I laughed out loud was equaled by the number of times I got a knot in my stomach. Solomon deftly fills her finely crafted stories with surprising stylistic touches, too: a story written entirely in the second person, turning you--the reader--into the only unbeliever stuck at a Christian summer camp; the moving "choose-your-own adventure" ending of the last story; the title itself, which brilliantly illustrates the complex tone of the book. Spoken with the right amount of coolness, the phrase "Get Down" can capture the life of the party. But who really has the charisma to pull off that pronunciation? In the mouths of the book's self-conscious adolescents (or its real-life reviewers!), "Get Down" takes on its true ambiguity: a cool phrase spoken by someone who's not. And when you find the phrase in the fourth story, it takes on a whole new meaning, which I'll let you discover for yourself. . . .

UP with Get Down!

I have very little time for reading these days, so when I picked up this short-story collection at the bookstore, it was with the express idea of reading a story a day, right before slipping into my nightly coma. But after the first story, I was hooked. I stayed up half the night to read ALL the stories in one sitting, and plan on re-reading them again soon. Solomon has a great eye for telling details and an equally good ear for dialogue that always rings true. Even if you didn't grow up in West Philadelphia, you will recognize yourself in this book, but it will be the self you--and all of us--abandoned when you did what you had to do to become tough, invulnerable, and popular. Reading these stories reminded me of my wounded and needy self, but also me when I felt life and other people intensely. In this way, these stories are a gift.