4.5
This is a wonderful story of optimism, courage and love, while also serving as an illustration of the unfortunate way in which people create “clear pictures” of a person based solely on inner perceptions clouded by stereotypes or their bad choices, and how people assume to know who someone is, only to be grossly and sometimes tragically inaccurate.
“How easy it [is] to . . . assume we [know] the outlines of [a person’s] characters, the colors within, the brushstrokes that defined them.”
CJ Davis has always been hemmed in by his circumstances—his family, his last name and where he lives. To the surrounding community, he is just another criminal “Davis” and will never be anything more. Because of the family CJ was born into, he was automatically written off by many of the people and institutions that should have protected him, including the school system, child protective services and the police. After a stupid mistake, CJ is simply trying to navigate the course of his life and its associated challenges the best way he knows how.
No matter that he lives a quiet life and does his best to be invisible, outside of his great-uncle, Pops, who raised him, and his boss, no one bothers to try to get to know him, even the people tasked with helping him, until Noah. With Noah’s encouragement and belief, CJ is finally able to feel that he deserves the life he always wanted—as just a simple, honest, hardworking man who gets to be seen as an individual, beyond the stigma and connotation of his last name. However, trying to make a better life for himself and Pops is made exponentially harder by the presence of CJ’s violent, belligerent and alcoholic father, Dwayne, and as CJ’s belief in himself grows, his unwillingness to be his father’s punching bag increases, culminating in a showdown that has the potential to threaten all CJ’s hard work.
As a newly minted parole officer (PO), Noah has personal experience with the concept that one bad choice can ruin a good person’s life and that people are often more than just their bad choices; thus, he is determined to see his parolees as individuals with families and histories beyond their case files. He doesn’t want to write them off or become jaded, and sees his job as an avenue to help people get the opportunities they need to make better choices. Upon meeting his first parolee, CJ, Noah learns that wanting to help and being able to will require much more dedication and stubbornness than he realized.
In the course of getting to know CJ in order to help him, Noah is enchanted by the inner strength, goodness and innocence that CJ protects with the chip on his shoulder and bad-boy rep, and while falling for CJ is easy, witnessing the challenges and unfairness in CJ’s daily existence is anything but. For CJ, having someone who encourages him, pushes him to do more and believes in him is a new and heady experience. At first cautious and wary of his motives, CJ soon begins to trust in Noah’s intentions and finds it hard to deny his attraction to the irrepressible do-gooder.
As the chemistry grows between them and their time as PO and parolee winds down, CJ and Noah count the days until they can have a more personal relationship, but all the hard work CJ is doing and the promise of a relationship is overshadowed by CJ’s fear of his father—the fear that Dwayne will find out he’s trying to improve his situation and the debilitating fear he will find out that CJ is gay. CJ and Pops keep banking on Dwayne returning to prison soon, but instead of going out drinking and brawling like he used to, he stays home drinking and menacing his family. As tensions in the home escalate and his father’s anger grows, CJ and Pops are put into a precarious situation with no good options; turning Dwayne in for assault guarantees an even worse home situation when he gets out again, but CJ’s growing confidence and happiness stokes his father’s already irascible temper. Moreover, Noah can only watch helplessly from the sidelines as CJ’s home life deteriorates at the same time his future is growing brighter.
I love a book with not just well fleshed out characters, but a fleshed-out sense of their environment and life. Instead of just dropping the MCs into their circumstances and lightly filling in pieces to get to the “good stuff”, Walker takes her time, letting the reader explore Noah and CJ’s lives, while they do so as well. Giving the characters more room to breathe helps build and develop their personalities and offers a better understanding of what drives the MCs and the inevitable ways in which the they will affect one another. While I may not have agreed with some of Noah and CJ’s more consequential choices, and for all his Pollyanna ways, Noah is not immune to reducing CJ to his past mistakes instead of trusting in who CJ is, being given the opportunity to truly get to know the MCs kept me from detaching from the story, as sometimes happens when their actions seem done for drama or don’t have enough backstory to make sense.
Because CJ has been heartrendingly bereft of any human contact or comfort as simple as holding hands and the constraints of their professional relationship, his and Noah’s courtship is a lovely slow burn. Although the course of the book takes place only over four weeks, it feels much longer because of the sense of intimacy the narrative slowly builds, a sense of intimacy presented well by Joel Leslie’s narration. Hearing the hesitancy and awe conveyed by Leslie when CJ and Noah hold hands or hug and how those simple acts move them in different ways, is so heartwarming and beautiful. Moreover, with CJ being so unfamiliar with talking about his emotions, Leslie does a good job infusing CJ’s initial hesitancy and then his growing trust and wonder into the character’s voice and inner monologues. “On Davis Row” does an excellent job highlighting a common but little acknowledged fact that people who commit crimes are still people and should be judged as a whole, while telling a beautiful story of love, hope and the power of being seen for who you are.
Reviewed for The Novel Approach Reviews