I can’t think of a more appropriate book for our first spotlight recommendation. Excellence more than lives up to its name-sake. It’s an afro futuristic, action-fantasy tour de force with the soul-baring emotional vulnerability usually reserved for memoirs. This book fills the space between Rawlings’ Harry Potter and Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. If you’re anything like me, this is the best kind of gift. A work of art so urgent and vital that it made me a little mad at myself for not knowing I needed it. Excellence is an ode to righteous anger and youthful rebellion that is sure to jump-start your radical imagination. Co-created by author Brandon Thomas and artist Khary Randolf with colors from Emilio Lopez, Excellence is well-worth the price of admission.
From a distance, this story is about magic and the magicians who wield it. They’ve got spells, wands, enchantments and every trope we’ve come to love and expect from the genre. However, I’ve also come to expect shallow, obtuse commentary on the nature of good and evil coupled with the complete omission of non-white folks. Let me assure you this is not that. Thomas has a special mind.
In the world of Excellence, magic is controlled by a faceless organization called the Aegis. There are ten Black families predisposed to magic, commonly known as the tenth, who have been favored by the Aegis for generations. These Black magicians have the ability to reshape the world. But they are only able to use said magic to benefit those the Aegis deems worthy. (Spoiler alert: the “worthy” are well-to-do white folks.) From the outset, author Brandon Thomas has created an uncomfortably familiar tension between systems of power and Black folks’ struggle towards self-determination.
Our protagonist is Spencer Dales, son of the tenth, and heir to a legacy of Black excellence. We follow him as he transitions into manhood and in doing so, peels back the layers of compromise and deceit that helped shape his family’s legacy. We find him at the part of the journey where he’s beginning to see the forest for the trees. He is coming of age, he is stepping into the light, it’s filling him with rage, and he has to decide what to do about it. I can’t lie, he’s my favorite part of the book. He embodies a quote by the late great Toni Morrison, “The function of freedom is to set somebody else free.”
What makes Excellence stand apart is that it’s a fantasy about reality. Instead of omitting the often painful, ism-laiden complexities of life in the US, it utilizes magic to contextualize them. You simply couldn’t replicate this storytelling fingerprint without the lived experience of being Black in the world. Without being a Black man with a Black father, sifting through that kaleidoscope of tiny tragedies we call “raising a son.” That being said, don’t get it twisted. This book isn’t about representation, it’s about communication. So much of what we communicate is cultural; intangible, inherited, and embedded in ritual. There is a mirror here for anybody with a generational curse of their own to break, and there are high-stakes, heart-racing, magical fisticuffs here for those with a taste for the fantastical. Check it out here!
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