Reviews with content warning for Suicidal thoughts - Friday Black

It's been a while since I read this collection, but after finishing another one by another author I had to write my review. This is probably the best collection I've read in my life, so far. There are stories in here that I remember even now, months later after finishing this. I would give it a full 5 stars, but the first story, The Finkelstein 5, felt like it dropped the concept of

Emmanuel rating his Blackness on a numerical scale

towards the end, but maybe I took this concept too literally instead of it being something that exists inside his head.
Lark Street had a good premise, but I thought

the talking fetuses was too silly

.
Through the Flash is the story that will stick with me, and has stuck with me, for a very long time. In conclusion, I enjoyed the stories dealing with dystopian settings or satirical political commentary like Zimmer Land the ones set in a retail store.

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booksthatburn's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

FRIDAY BLACK is a finely constructed collection of stories which range from simply invoking a certain kind of Black and American existence, to ones where the premise is inextricable from the intersection of these identities.

Some of them have not literally happened but feel like they could if reality got just a little bit worse (or, more awfully, like they’re already here). Others are more speculative, requiring some shift in reality in order to be plausible, or being altogether impossible. In all of them, the relevant social and existential rules are deftly conveyed to build tiny pockets of a different space, in which a story is told that believes its own premise unabashedly and wholeheartedly.

Three of the stories have a shared underlying reality, but I’m not certain whether the others are meant to be connected with them or not. None of the premises are mutually exclusive, but a few would definitely be oddly paired if they canonically coexist. My favorites are “Zimmer Land” (for the way it shows the precarious position of a marginalized employee in a job which objectifies his existence even as it exploits his identity), Friday Black” (for making shopping feel like a zombie story), and “Through the Flash” (for unflinchingly capturing the potential and inevitability of brutality in a certain kind of time loop).

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