Many books will make you see and feel, but David Jackson Ambrose has created in A Blind Eye, a feast for all your senses, a journey that may leave the reader exhausted, but oh so rewarded. This book is not a page turner, and that’s the beauty of it. The reader must pay attention and ponder the complexities of the characters, consider their harrowing and unique experiences that, for most of us, will be far from our own. The richness of the language makes them real as we see, feel, hear, taste, and smell this feast. The characters, like the story itself, are daring and brave. They give us a multi-framed window into the Black gay urban experience. If they had been contemporaneous with the Stonewall Uprising, I would imagine them on the front lines ushering in the modern movement for LGBTQ rights, particularly Ricky and Robby. These two neighbors of the protagonist are superbly drawn, their mannerisms gender fluid, and their speech leaping off the page with banter and shade. Yes, they are deeply troubled, but there is a gradual reveal of why they are so. The other neighbors include Asians, a Latino, a young white man wannbe Black, and a woman torn between her religious upbringing and her attraction to Black culture. At the center of it all is Babe, a physically beautiful, sexy man, everyone gravitates to when he walks in the room, generous to a fault, and battered by his own set of demons from the past. His search for love is not surprisingly messy. He bonds with an overweight neighbor boy with an overbearing homophobic mom, seeing elements of his own childhood in the boy. The tension builds throughout the book, and the fear the Black community lives with on a daily basis—police involvement—looms heavily as the characters try to resolve a smorgasbord of hot and cold issues.
