"Saving Ruby King" - 2020's Most Underrated Book

Racism, deceit, murder: three words that Chicagoans hear every day, leaving them numbed by and complicit to the daily news reports from all over the city. A new shooting here, a new shooting there. Everything that goes on just becomes another bleep in the scanner.

"Saving Ruby King" reminds us that these are the stories of people, not blind statistics. Gun violence is not supposed to be something we're used to: it's supposed to be shocking, sad, and unforgiveable.

This book, told from multiple viewpoints, reminds us that we're all just trying to survive. A dead mother and a brutal father. Ruby is trying to navigate the drowning levels of grief while understanding complex emotions and relationships. Her friend, Layla, trying to get her through to the other side of grief and depression, doesn't understand the whole story. Layla's mission to save her friend is complicated further by her own father, pastor of the local church.

The force majeure in this masterpiece is the telling of the story from the church itself. Omniscient, all-knowing – the church is not just a structure. The personification of faith itself in the southside Black community is very Gatsby, and very much the only way to tell this story. Without this point-of-view, we would be missing so much. The outsider’s perspective told over the course of multiple decades is, without fail, the heart of the story. West’s ability to write as an inanimate object rather than a person with feelings, emotions, and thoughts provides the opportunity to see everyone for who they truly are: it’s almost as if the church is God himself.

The story of Ruby and Layla and those that surround them in their working-class world is the story of all Americans that have faced contempt, and this will properly outrage the majority of us. So many times while reading this story, one wonders why something is happening or why an individual is doing a certain thing. Trauma is passed down from generation to generation, and racial turmoil is part of that.

It's a story not just of the brutalities that minorities, especially Black Americans, deal with, but it's a story to help others try to understand. It’s about learning empathy for situations that we don’t all have experience in. Ruby is trying to deal with her grief after the loss of her mother, but she is also trying to wrap her head around the fact that the police aren’t investigating this event. She’s trying to understand why her father is around, is so aggressive and mean, and why her mother never left him, but she’s also trying to understand why society allows this to happen. Why does Black America have the blind eye for situations that so often go fixed and corrected in white America?

It's a story of friendship and how the bonds we make in our lives will help us deal with the complexities of life, from sociocultural issues like systemic racism and unfair policing, to the micro-aggressions we all face such as family tension and our own emotional wars. Saving Ruby King is important as we try to understand and empathize cultures and communities and races that we’re not part of ourselves.

This book came out earlier this year and is overwhelmingly underappreciated. It’s a book that makes one think of the reality of what’s going on – on the southside of Chicago and all over the nation. Why are certain races and cultures treated differently than others? Don’t we all experience grief and sadness and anger the same way? It’s a book that provides feelings bigger than the novel itself.