‘Disgruntled’: A powerful story of growing up black

Most Americans know architect Frank Lloyd Wright, but few know the story of his cook, a Barbados man named Julian Carlton, who brutally murdered Wright's mistress, her children and four workers in 1914.

A cruel man delivering a cruel fate, but is the story more complicated than that? In Asali Solomon's debut novel 'Disgruntled” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26, out Feb. 3), Carleton's story moves steadily under the surface of a remarkable story about Kenya, a young woman born and raised in West Philadelphia in the 1980s. The result is a beautifully textured novel exploring the complications of what it means to grow up young, gifted and black in America.

In addition to Kenya's journey into adulthood, 'Disgruntled” also is the story of her parents' transition, as they divorce and forge new identities for themselves. As her parents become new people, Kenya feels unmoored, as her parents' new paths divert so dramatically from the one they forged together in Kenya's childhood.

Given there are so many layers to Kenya's story - the story of her growing older, the story of her parents, the story of her finding courage thanks to her knowledge of black history - there is not one central climax to the novel. Rather, the work builds to a confluence of stories; matters are not resolved in the end, but the characters, Kenya especially, resolve to move forward after a series of challenges.

It would be easy to just call 'Disgruntled” a coming-of-age novel, but that would be too simplistic of a view. Instead, it's better to discuss Solomon's work in the company of other powerful short novels about young people, such as Justin Torres' 'We the Animals.”

It is a tight, multilayered book, told from a child's point of view, that is about more than the trivialities of youth: 'Disgruntled” is a novel about the questions and longings we carry with us well into adulthood.