Where I Must Go: A Novel

by Angela Jackson

Lyrical, penetrating, and highly charged, this novel displays a delicately tuned sense of difference and belonging. Poet Angela Jackson brings her superb sense of language and of human possibility to the story of young Magdalena Grace, whose narration takes readers through both privilege and privation at the time of the American civil rights movement.

The novel moves from the privileged yet racially exclusive atmosphere of the fictional Eden University to the black neighborhoods of a Midwestern city and to ancestral Mississippi. Magdalena’s story includes a wide range of characters—black and white, male and female, favored with opportunity or denied it, the young in love and elders wise with hope. With and through each other, they struggle to understand the history they are living and making. With dazzling perceptiveness, Jackson’s narrator Magdalena tells of the complex interactions of people around her who embody the personal and the political at a crucial moment in their own lives and in the making of America.

Genres: Fiction

400 pages, Hardcover

First published June 28, 2009

Reviews

[University of Chicago Magazine]

Angela Jackson, AM’95
Author

From our pages (Mar–Apr/10): "This partly autobiographical novel presents the American civil-rights movement through the eyes of narrator Magdalena Grace, a 17-year-old African American student at the mostly white, Midwestern, Eden University in 1967. Through a series of vignettes, Jackson’s character relays her own late-adolescent experiences amid racial and class-based tensions in the late 1960s."

[Srplymate]

Angela is the sister of a great family friend of ours, Prentiss Jackson. Every word holds meaning and the sentences are strung together to create a powerful story. I have heard this is also somewhat autobiographical, which makes it even more interesting to get a glimpse into Mrs. Jackson's life.

[Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one took me a bit of time to get into. The writing style is quite different. It seems trite to say that it's poetic, but I don't really know how else to describe it. The flow of the language is as enjoyable as the storyline and it certainly gives an extra dimension to the book.

[Clifford · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a moving, lyrical novel about a difficult time. I recommend it to anyone who wants to understand America.