A Year in Reading: Michael Bourne

Twenty years ago, my sister sent me a book in the mail. My sister isn’t one to send letters and she’d never sent me a book before. The book was a debut novel by a writer I’d never heard of, and inside the front cover my sister had written a short note, which read:

“This is a book about elevators. You have to read it.”

The novel was by , and my sister was right, I did have to read it. Set in a city that sounds a lot like postwar New York but isn’t, the novel conjures a world in what’s wrong with it. When Lila Mae Watson, a young Intuitionist and the city’s first black woman inspector, is blamed for the failure of an elevator, the novel sets in motion a sly allegory on racial uplift.