THE BEAUTIFUL MATH OF CORAL: A NOVEL takes a simple premise and runs with it: what is it like to find oneself pushed down a particular career route by parental pressure, only to push right back? Author E. Ozie depicts her protagonist negotiating the unique pressures of college, social life, and parental expectations in this diverting story.
Coral is a science-oriented teenager whose artsy father constantly pushes her in the direction of his chosen field: art. At length she heads to college, where she attends classes in Engineering and befriends Fernando, a fellow student. Integral to the plot is Coral’s and Fernando’s statuses as Nigerian American and Mexican American (respectively) on a predominantly-white campus. Ozie—herself a Nigerian American—is acutely aware of the continuing under-representation of ethnic minorities in STEM subjects, and frames the pair as pushing against this paradigm. She also valorizes the “unconventional beauty” of STEM, seeing a kind of synergy between math and the aesthetics of written art, for example. Anyone familiar with the work of, say, Randall Monroe will not find this a particularly revolutionary idea. But where Ozie’s work distinguishes itself is in its depiction of academic discovery, the feeling of reaching for—and achieving—a kind of understanding that transcends shallow learning.
Here and there, the book fetches up against cliché. While the clash between Coral and her parents’ expectations forms an important part of the backdrop of this story in the opening two chapters, they are painted in the broadest of broad strokes: Coral’s father is a perennially-annoyed jerk whose self-obsession extends to not bothering to help his daughter unpack on arriving at college, while her mother is disappointed by her lack of interest in makeup. Coral’s loneliness and inability to find friends on her wavelength—a fifth wheel at a double date, a greenhorn making a fool of herself in government class—also pushes a little too hard at well-worn student misfit tropes. But the novel’s language is unfussy and on-point—Ozie has a good read on the rhythms and flows of conversation, and the internal monologues are clinical and to-the-point. The effect is to place Coral’s intellectual and emotional growth at the forefront of this entertaining and thought-provoking work.
In E. Ozie’s THE BEAUTIFUL MATH OF CORAL: A NOVEL, a young woman defies her father’s expectations and heads to college to study STEM in an intriguing coming-of-age novel.
~Craig Jones for IndieReader