I Am Ayah

Starred review from April 3, 2023
Hill (Confessions in B-flat) delivers a beautiful love story that doubles as a heartfelt family saga with just a hint of magical realism. Though the biggest opportunity of Alessandra Fleming’s photography career approaches, she drops everything to rush home to Sag Harbor when she learns that her estranged father has been hospitalized. Once home, she’s dogged by mysterious flashbacks to lives she’s never lived. Soon, she realizes the only solution is to dig into the family history her late mother struggled to keep secret. Zach Renard calls his grandmother’s Sag Harbor house home, but he’s normally on the road as a traveling ethnographer. Though they’ve never met before, he and Alessandra share an instant mutual attraction, and he puts his skills to use to help her uncover the family secrets that might make sense of her psychic episodes. As the pair fall in love, they also work through mutual trauma. In rich, velvety prose, Hill manages to make the present and past story lines equally captivating. The complexity of the plot and depth of the emotions make this stand out.

April 21, 2023

In multi-published, multi-genre author Hill's (After the Lights Go Down) latest, Alessandra Fleming puts her New York City life on hold and returns to Sag Harbor, Long Island, after receiving news of a family emergency. She is reluctant to return to a place with many troubling memories. Her father's neighbor, polite and attractive Zach, attempts to help her, but she keeps him at arm's length, preferring to work through her problems alone. Back in her family home, the disturbing waking dreams she experienced as a child return. When an old chest filled with diaries and documents is discovered, Alessandra accepts Zach's help to make sense of its contents with the hope of finding an explanation for her visions. While the plot of the two main characters is slow and predictable at times, the storylines revealed in the diary entries are where this novel really shines. The ancestral voices they contain uncover secrets from Alessandra's family and provide first-hand accounts of significant moments in American history. VERDICT Recommended for libraries creating adult summer reading collections, particularly those with seeking literary characters of color. Romance readers looking for an easy plot, likable characters, and sizzling love scenes will not be disappointed.--Kathaleen McCormick

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 15, 2023
A Black couple's romance ties together the past and the present in Hill's novel. The author interweaves a present-day storyline--photographer Alessandra Fleming leaves Manhattan for her hometown of Sag Harbor, New York, after her widowed and estranged father is hospitalized--with a series of first-person narratives that relate the story of Ayah, a woman kidnapped and enslaved in the 19th century. When she returns to Sag Harbor, Alessandra meets her neighbor's grandson Zach Renard, an ethnographer studying the history of free Black communities on Long Island. The two feel an instant connection that intensifies as Zach supports Alessandra through her father's final days. She is determined to understand the family secrets her parents kept from her as well as the increasing number of unnerving experiences she has been having, sensing sights, sounds, and smells that are not there. When Alessandra discovers a chest full of newspaper clippings, photos, and other artifacts, Zach brings his research skills to bear, and together they uncover Alessandra's family history and its place in the Black diaspora. The emotionally satisfying love story is complemented by the book's solid historical grounding as well as a cast of well-developed supporting characters--Zach's grandmother Grace Oweku; Alessandra's elderly neighbor Edith Samuels; and her longtime best friend, Traci Howard--who come with backstories that could fill a separate novel. The writing and pacing are solid, making it easy to get hooked by the story. The book's supernatural elements ("When she opened the door to her space, a sudden flash of seeing herself stepping into a dim, lantern-lit room that smelled of damp wood, sea moss, and dirt floors leaped in front of her. The surreal moment seized her breath. She gripped the doorframe, shook her head, and the image scattered like startled birds") echo those in Octavia E. Butler's Kindred while allowing Alessandra's story to remain entirely its own. The narrative explores issues of systemic racism, slavery, generational wealth-building, and chosen families, addressing them organically without overwhelming the reader with heavy-handed messages. Distinguished by its intense and passionate love story and its insistence on the contemporary relevance of historical events, this engaging tale will keep the reader turning pages until the end. An enjoyable romance brings Black history into the present.

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