The Breaks: An Essay

By Julietta Singh

A profound meditation on race, inheritance, and queer mothering at the end of the world.

Format: Paperback
Pages: 256

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SURPRISE YOUR SHELF #005 SELECTION

In a letter to her 6-year-old daughter, Julietta Singh writes toward a tender vision of the world, offering children’s radical embrace of possibility as a model for how we might live.

In order to survive looming political and ecological disasters, Singh urges, we must break from the conventions we have inherited and begin to orient ourselves toward more equitable and revolutionary paths.

The Breaks celebrates queer family-making, communal living, and Brown girlhood, complicating the stark binaries that shape contemporary US discourse. With nuance and generosity, Singh reveals the connections among the crises humanity faces—climate catastrophe, extractive capitalism, and the violent legacies of racism, patriarchy, and colonialism—inviting us to move through the breaks toward a tenable future.

Read if you: can't imagine being parent to a child of the TikTok generation.