The First Part Last

Johnson, Angela. 2003. The First Part Last. New York: Simon Pulse. ISBN 0-689-84923-0.

The First Part Last is a brilliant book that completely deserves its Printz Award and Coretta Scott King Award. The main event that drives the plot is the discovery by the narrator, Bobby, that his girlfriend is pregnant. This is the part of the review where I would normally discuss how well the author handles the difficult subject, but what makes this book so excellent is that Johnson never makes you feel like she’s “handling” a “subject” at all – she’s telling a story about people, people who feel real and who react in ways that reflect their unique characters.

Bobby, at sixteen, is raising his infant daughter Feather. There are plenty of people who want to help – from his father and older brother to his former baby-sitter who now sits for his daughter. But as his mother points out, Bobby is the one who’s ultimately responsible for Feather, and that means that Bobby has to grow up quickly. There’s the requisite talk about how tired Bobby is and how Feather manages to pee the minute after he’s changed her diaper. But Johnson also captures the intense bond between Bobby and his daughter. Bobby says, “I’ve never been closer to or loved anybody more than I love Feather” (96), and we know it’s true.

The book is divided into short sections titled “Then” and “Now.” Roughly, “Then” is before Feather’s birth and “Now” is afterward, although it’s a little confusing at first, especially if (like me) you tend to skip chapter titles. And when then and now converge at Feather’s birth near the end of the novel, the rest of the story takes on even deeper meaning.

Johnson's cultural markers seem to me to be authentic and accurate, from the descriptions of Bobby's neighborhood (ethnic restaurants of all kinds, people calling to each other in the street late at night when the clubs close) to the main characters (his girlfriend's cowrie-shell bracelet). Among the characters there is a diversity of occupations and income levels.

Bobby's narrative reads as if he's talking, using "'cause" for "because" and "hangin'" for "hanging." It sounds natural and unforced.

The only thing I didn’t like about this book was the back jacket blurb on my copy. It described Bobby as “a classic urban teenager.” It made me think of a pastor I used to work for who pointed out to me whenever he thought that white people were using “urban” as code for “black.” “For instance,” I remember he said once to a white pastor whose church was all white, “your church is an urban church.”

“Oh, no,” the other pastor said, looking flustered. “My church isn’t urban.”

“It’s in the middle of town,” my pastor said. “’Urban’ means pertaining to a city. It doesn’t mean ‘black.’”

I can’t imagine the person who wrote the back jacket copy on my book describing Mia Thermopolis of the Princess Diaries books as an “urban teenager,” even though she lives in the middle of New York City. Since I’m sure Angela Johnson wasn’t responsible for the jacket copy, this one false note doesn’t reflect on the excellent story of The First Part Last.

Because I really liked the front cover picture – a young man in dreadlocks holding a baby – I think I would use this book to start a discussion about book jackets and how well or badly they work as advertisements for the book inside. I would definitely include the jackets for Megan Whalen Turner’s excellent Thief trilogy. (A recent Horn Book article pointed out that while the text indicates that the characters have dark skin and Turner says she pictures them looking like Sherpas, the people in the cover art are definitely Caucasian.)

In School Library Journal, Miranda Doyle said this novel was “brief, poetic, and absolutely riveting,” but thought that the plot twist revealed toward the end was “melodramatic.”

Doyle, Miranda. School Library Journal. Qtd. In Amazon.com. http://www.amazon.com/First-Part-Last-Angela-Johnson/dp/0689849230/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-5676480-3776938?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1182707377&sr=1-1.