Kingdom of No Tomorrow by Fabienne Josaphat

Kingdom of No Tomorrow
by Fabienne Josaphat

Preorder, releasing December 3

Outside the window was thunder, lightning, and a fierce rain, and inside Fabienne Josaphat’s novel, Kingdom of No Tomorrow, a storm raged as well. A storm that’s raged so many times, the oppressed against the oppressor. A storm that rages all around us today.

Kingdom of No Tomorrow’s storm is the storm of the Black Panthers. No, not the Marvel Studio superhero Black Panther fantasy movie, the doomed Black Panther Party of the late 1960s era. The Black Power movement forerunner to Black Lives Matter.
What image comes to mind when you think of the Black Panthers? A macho Black man dressed in a black coat with a black beret? Maybe with a big gun in his hand?

But this paramilitary figure wasn’t at the core of the Black Panthers. It was a woman hell-bent on helping those around her. Someone like Josaphat’s main character, Nettie, with her clipboard in a sickle cell clinic. For the movement was more about health, food, and education than it was about guns. The brutal, scary Black Panther was an image created by the cunning FBI and spewed out by the media. Afterall, a big Black man out to kill whitey gets more eyes than a composed Black woman testing for the “colored’s” sickle cell disease or filling hundreds of bags of free groceries.

Kingdom of No Tomorrow takes readers on a journey of revolutionary hope, sacrifice, and disappointment seen through the eyes of the empowered women who made up most of the Black Panther membership. Resolute women who had each other’s backs. Charismatic women who stood uncrushed in the crushing gears of politics, violence, and systematic sexual inequality. As Nettie thinks in the book, “This was the life she’d stepped into, and there was no glamour in it. No glory. Not even the promise of a rising sun.” Yet, she persisted.

The 2023 winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction established by Barbara Kingsolver, it’s an emotional and important story few know. The novel is well-researched, true to history, filled and insightful as to the perils and promises of revolutionary thinking, especially when love and conflicting values are involved. The characters are crisp and well-developed. Suspense builds nicely, especially in last half of the book. Set both in Oakland, California and Chicago, with links back to the disappointingly barbarous Papa Doc years of Haiti.

Very readable. Put it on the top of your book list and read it.

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