The Tower
The central item of importance relative to imagery in the novel is a building introduced in the opening paragraphs as the Tower. It is this building which stimulates the story. It is not entirely desirable:
“The Tower had shown up just over a year ago, totally unannounced: a five-story concrete monstrosity on a block otherwise full of brownstones. The developers built the outer structure quickly and then left it, abandoned and unfinished, its unpaned windows staring emptily out into the Brooklyn skies. The Tower’s northern wall sat right on the edge of the Junklot, where mountains of trashed cars waited like crumpled-up scraps of paper.”
The Dead
What if the spirits of the dead resided inside you? And what if you could recall their lives through the sensory imagery of their experiences? It might go a little something like this:
“A dizzying collage of smells, moments, emotions, longings sped through Sierra’s entire body. She was on a horse in the rain forest, galloping toward freedom. She was alone in a cell, coming to terms for the four hundredth time with her imminent death and the deaths she’d dealt. She was in the full rapture of love. She was ashamed. Her brain simmered with bursts of lilac, cigar smoke, sweat, the cringe of a missed opportunity, pangs of hunger. Most of all, though, she felt alive. The dead were so alive!”
Rap Rumble in Brooklyn
The protagonist shows up at a party and instantly scopes out the main attractions. One of which is a freestyle rap showdown pitting her friend Izzy against one nattily attired sophomore named Pitkin. The description itself is almost a rap song:
“Over at the freestyle circle, her friend Izzy delivered a crushing sixteen-bar denouncement of another kid’s mama. Tee cheered her girlfriend from the crowd. Bennie joined the circle, laughing along with each line. Izzy wrapped up with a triumphant and brutal verse rhyming spastic, sarcastic, and less than fantastic, and the crowd erupted in thunderous applause. The other kid, an extra-short and elegantly dressed tenth grader named Pitkin, recognized defeat and stepped back into the crowd with a gentlemanly bow.”
Racism
The novel addresses racism in a variety of ways, including the imagery of physical appearances. Often, this is most interesting as a result of the characters who are the target of overt racism recognizing how they themselves express aspects of thought as if through some perverse ideological osmosis:
“But once when she was chatting with some stupid boy online, she described herself as the color of coffee with not enough milk. There was a pause in the conversation, and the words glared back at her strangely, like the echo of a burp in an empty auditorium. She wondered if what she’d typed was burning holes in her chat partner too. Then he typed o thas hot yo and she’d quickly slammed her laptop shut. In the sudden darkness of her bedroom, the words had lingered as if imprinted in her forehead: not enough.”
