"The Other Black Girl," "The Chosen and the Beautiful," "No One Is Talking About This," and "Remote Control"

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.

Nnedi's Remote Control had some promise, but its brevity--at somewhere around 150 pages, short even for a regular novel--really felt a deficit in a science-fiction book. There was too much unanswered and undeveloped in the world building and character building.

The quite good:

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.

Most recently I read Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking About This. Apparently Lockwood is somewhat famous as a poet/social media presence, but I'd never heard of her, which let me go into the book a clean slate. The first half of the book follows the thoughts of a social media influencer, made famous for the absurdist Tweet "can a dog be twins?" She's ambivalent about her attachment to "the portal," as she calls it, aware of its pull and the ephemeral nature of internet fame. Even though my social media presence is light--I scroll Facebook more than I should but almost never post--I was constantly chuckling at moments of recognition, at how astutely Lockwood understands the absurdity of our attachment. Half way through, the narrator is confronted by a family tragedy, and the real world invades her focus on the internet. It could easily have been an "internet-crazed young person learns the importance of family" kind of novel, but Lockwood avoids such easy answers. The narrator is moved by the physicality of her experience, but the internet also remains a place of solace. The book is sharp and definitely has me wanting to read more from Lockwood.