I'm horribly behind in reviews. I suppose with school starting and feeling anxious about sort of everything, I haven't been able to muster the intellectual gumption necessary to write even a bland review. It's a shame because I've read a couple good ones recently! My last four books:
- The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris
- The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo
- No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
- Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor
First, the less-than-thrilling:
The Chosen and the Beautiful was my second foray into Gatsby fanfic. It was far superior to Nick, mostly because it openly acknowledges The Great Gatsby as its source material, but it also didn't amount to much. Sure, it was neat to have Jordan as the narrator, and I liked the idea of complicating her identity by making her a bisexual Vietnamese adoptee, but in the end Vo's revisionist take didn't seem to have anything new to say. And the demon blood and magic felt like unnecessary distractions.
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The quite good:
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The Other Black Girl takes on the traditional mystery genre, but wraps it up in some sharp commentary about race. It follows Nella, the only Black employee at Wagner book publishing. When Hazel, another Black woman, is hired, Nella is excited to have a comrade in her wearying attempts to challenge entrenched racism and microaggressions at the publisher. However, soon after she gets a threatening note to "Leave Wagner"... and everything spirals from there. The novel captures the paranoia of a good thriller, enhanced by Nella's feelings of isolation from her white co-workers. Her struggle to be heard and believed is not just a convention of the genre but a reflection of the challenge of Black employees in white-dominated spaces. I've read complaints about the sci-fi twist at the end, but I found it fitting within the larger commentary.
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