Crafting Creative Concepts with Charlotte

Beloved and White Boy Shuffle  are really different books in a number of ways. They're set more than 100 years removed from each other, and it's hard to draw many similarities between the main characters of each, Sethe and Gunnar. Sethe is an outcast - Gunnar, a celebrity. Sethe lives in rural Ohio - Gunnar lives in LA. I could go on and on. However, at the end of White Boy Shuffle  there was a scene that I felt connected Sethe and Gunnar very closely. Gunnar and Yoshiko have their first child towards the end of White Boy Shuffle , Naomi. She's about two years old at the end of the book, and we last see the Kaufmans awaiting a nuclear attack from the government. The fate of Naomi seemed very similar to me to the fate of Beloved: both killed by their parents (though Naomi a bit less directly) as toddlers to escape a life of oppression. But they don't get a chance at life because of this, and you have to wonder if it's even the right of Gunnar and Sethe to take the