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I loved this book so much that it was difficult to review. It was one of my favorites of all the books I read for Bouchercon. (My other favorites were Razorblade Tears and Blacktop Wasteland by S. A. Cosby and Winter Counts by David Heska Wambli Weiden.)
I would never have read this book if it hadn't been for Bouchercon, as the blurb did not make it sound like something I'd enjoy. It's about the only Black woman working in a low-level publishing job when another Black woman joins the company, and the blurb was all about office politics, social satire, and racism. I really don't like stories about office politics, social satire is extremely hit-or-miss for me, and I'm a hard sell on stories about women fighting each other for scraps.
The Other Black Girl may be the only book I've ever enjoyed that's largely about office politics. However, Harris worked in a publishing house for years, and that happens to be a business I'm familiar with, so the specifics of the office and its politics were dead-on. There's a major plotline about an acclaimed white writer whose very important American novel about the opioid crisis includes a Black addict named Shartricia which is at once darkly hilarious and infuriating.
But it's about so much more than office politics. This book is a wild ride. It uses multiple timelines and POVs to achieve gasp-worthy moments that reminded me of Catriona Ward's The Girl From Rawblood. The structure alone is incredibly skillful and fun to read.
It also achieves the thing I wanted and missed in The Collective, which is a real exploration of moral dilemmas involved in doing something revolutionary. Most books dodge that by picking someone as a villain who doesn't even believe in the goals, and dumping all the bad actions on them. The Other Black Girl doesn't do that. There's villains, but not that sort, and there's people making actual morally ambiguous choices.
Looking at the blurb now, I see that either I missed the headline or they added a new one which gives you a better idea of where it's going. It was a lot of fun for me to go in completely cold, but given that most of you are probably also not into office politics...
( spoilers for premise, which you don't learn until about halfway through )
The Other Black Girl is a very original, cross-genre, hard to categorize book with elements of suspense, literary fiction, horror, satire, social commentary, and SFF. It's emotional and funny and very thought-provoking. The central metaphor really worked for me.
The book goes full meta on its readers in a scene where two Black women are talking about hair in an elevator with a white woman. One of the Black women imagines the white woman googling hair terms like "kitchen" and "4C." I felt called out as the white woman watching, I laughed, I googled. (I did know that 4C was a curl type, but not which one; I did not know "kitchen" in hair terms.)
Though this wasn't a book that was written for me, and I'm sure there was lots that went over my head completely, it was a book that got to me on a very personal level. Sometimes you love something in a way that goes beyond how objectively good something is, and I felt this way about The Other Black Girl, though it is in fact objectively good. I'm not Black and my experience of being the only woman in the room or the only Jew in the room is very different from that of being the only Black woman in the room. But this book really spoke to me, both in terms of what it was about and how it was written.
( spoilers for the entire book )
I was legit shocked that this didn't win the Anthony for best first novel, as it was far and away the best on that ballot and I'd have agonized if I'd had to pick between it and Razorblade Tears, which won best novel. The actual winner for best first novel was Arsenic and Adobo, which was an above-average cozy in a fun setting, and which I enjoyed but come on.
Black writers writing about racism were very well-represented on both the ballot and in winners overall, so I don't think that was the issue. Maybe some voters thought it was too weird, some thought it wasn't really a mystery or suspense novel (fair), and some really wanted to reward something light and fun. But come on.
ETA: I checked the reviews on Amazon and I get it now. This was a really polarizing book, and a lot of people hated the central conceit.They are objectively wrong. But yeah, I think "too weird" was the key issue.
Content notes: Depictions of the subtler kinds of racism throughout. A lot of uncomfortably relatable moments of workplace humiliation, tension, micro-aggressions, gaslighting, etc.
Spoilers for the entire book are fine in comments! You don't need to use rot.13. If you don't want to be spoiled, don't read the comments.
I would never have read this book if it hadn't been for Bouchercon, as the blurb did not make it sound like something I'd enjoy. It's about the only Black woman working in a low-level publishing job when another Black woman joins the company, and the blurb was all about office politics, social satire, and racism. I really don't like stories about office politics, social satire is extremely hit-or-miss for me, and I'm a hard sell on stories about women fighting each other for scraps.
The Other Black Girl may be the only book I've ever enjoyed that's largely about office politics. However, Harris worked in a publishing house for years, and that happens to be a business I'm familiar with, so the specifics of the office and its politics were dead-on. There's a major plotline about an acclaimed white writer whose very important American novel about the opioid crisis includes a Black addict named Shartricia which is at once darkly hilarious and infuriating.
But it's about so much more than office politics. This book is a wild ride. It uses multiple timelines and POVs to achieve gasp-worthy moments that reminded me of Catriona Ward's The Girl From Rawblood. The structure alone is incredibly skillful and fun to read.
It also achieves the thing I wanted and missed in The Collective, which is a real exploration of moral dilemmas involved in doing something revolutionary. Most books dodge that by picking someone as a villain who doesn't even believe in the goals, and dumping all the bad actions on them. The Other Black Girl doesn't do that. There's villains, but not that sort, and there's people making actual morally ambiguous choices.
Looking at the blurb now, I see that either I missed the headline or they added a new one which gives you a better idea of where it's going. It was a lot of fun for me to go in completely cold, but given that most of you are probably also not into office politics...
( spoilers for premise, which you don't learn until about halfway through )
The Other Black Girl is a very original, cross-genre, hard to categorize book with elements of suspense, literary fiction, horror, satire, social commentary, and SFF. It's emotional and funny and very thought-provoking. The central metaphor really worked for me.
The book goes full meta on its readers in a scene where two Black women are talking about hair in an elevator with a white woman. One of the Black women imagines the white woman googling hair terms like "kitchen" and "4C." I felt called out as the white woman watching, I laughed, I googled. (I did know that 4C was a curl type, but not which one; I did not know "kitchen" in hair terms.)
Though this wasn't a book that was written for me, and I'm sure there was lots that went over my head completely, it was a book that got to me on a very personal level. Sometimes you love something in a way that goes beyond how objectively good something is, and I felt this way about The Other Black Girl, though it is in fact objectively good. I'm not Black and my experience of being the only woman in the room or the only Jew in the room is very different from that of being the only Black woman in the room. But this book really spoke to me, both in terms of what it was about and how it was written.
( spoilers for the entire book )
I was legit shocked that this didn't win the Anthony for best first novel, as it was far and away the best on that ballot and I'd have agonized if I'd had to pick between it and Razorblade Tears, which won best novel. The actual winner for best first novel was Arsenic and Adobo, which was an above-average cozy in a fun setting, and which I enjoyed but come on.
Black writers writing about racism were very well-represented on both the ballot and in winners overall, so I don't think that was the issue. Maybe some voters thought it was too weird, some thought it wasn't really a mystery or suspense novel (fair), and some really wanted to reward something light and fun. But come on.
ETA: I checked the reviews on Amazon and I get it now. This was a really polarizing book, and a lot of people hated the central conceit.
Content notes: Depictions of the subtler kinds of racism throughout. A lot of uncomfortably relatable moments of workplace humiliation, tension, micro-aggressions, gaslighting, etc.
Spoilers for the entire book are fine in comments! You don't need to use rot.13. If you don't want to be spoiled, don't read the comments.
