Last Summer on State Street by Toya Wolfe
About the author
Toya Wolfe grew up in the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago’s South Side. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago. Her writing has appeared in African Voices, Chicago Journal, Chicago Reader, Hair Trigger 27, and WarpLand. She is the recipient of the Zora Neale Hurston-Bessie Head Fiction Award, the Union League Civic & Arts Foundation Short Story Competition, and the Betty Shifflet/John Schultz Short Story Award. She currently resides in Chicago. Last Summer on State Street is her debut novel.
Review
Claire Kohda
Friday 24 June, 2022
New York Times
In 1999 on Chicago’s South Side, 12-year-old Fe Fe lives in the Robert Taylor Homes, the now-demolished public housing project where Toya Wolfe, the author of Last Summer on State Street, also grew up. Fe Fe has three close friends, Precious, Stacia and Tonya, who play double Dutch with her, until one summer, “one by one, they dropped out of sight.”
This is a story of children who live in the projects having to become adults too early. Fe Fe narrates how it feels to be born right on the edges of society, and to be abandoned by it. The buildings’ 16-story walls, with their iron gates “running the length of each floor,” are like divisions between abundance and poverty, opportunity, and lack thereof.
This is a powerful novel about injustice, the institutional racism that is the foundation of the projects and their policing, and survival. Tragic, hopeful, brimming with love, Wolfe’s debut is a remarkable achievement.