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3.41 AVERAGE
3.41 AVERAGE
dark
emotional
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
dark
reflective
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
1.5 stars that I’m currently rounding up but might round down because this was my most anticipated book of the year and it actively pissed me off. This isn’t because it dared to tackle micro aggressions in liberal, white majority settings. That aspect was what drew me to the book in the first place.
Rather, I can’t shake the feeling that it didn’t tackle these issues well at all, to the point that it came across as hostile to the possibility of friendship between black women for me. I’m white so it’s entirely possible there are nuances I’m missing here and I’m going to seek out other reviews on this book and might change my review if something changes my mind. But my initial feeling about this book is that… it kind of reminds me of White Ivy in a way. These are two domestic-ish thrillers that initially stand out because they’re about women of color in a genre that’s very dominated by white female characters in the suburbs. I did like White Ivy more than this one but I can’t shake the feeling that publishers were okay with these two books over other WoC thrillers because these books repackage pernicious stereotypes in the guise of social commentary. Again I could be reading this wrong and I’ll get into what I mean in the spoiler section but …. Yeah my first reaction after I set the book aside was “well that was messed up and not in the way I think it intended to be.”
It’s sort of hard to talk about the Other Black Girl without spoiling but here are the few thoughts I can have about it outside the spoiler cut.
-I actually liked the first third of then novel! I feel like it did horror best here actually, mostly because it nails that feeling of working in an office and being out of step every minute of the day. I have social anxiety so sometimes I’m second guessing everything while in the office. The thought of having to second guess everything because of micro aggressions really stuck with me and made for a really tense read.
-In the first third I also was very interested in the relationship between Nella and Hazel. The push and pull and the overall awkwardness was very interesting.
-Unfortunately the book doesn’t stay focused on Nella and Hazel. There are a lot of chapters from the POV of other characters and these chapters are incredible hard to follow. This killed any dread or momentum for me because I was having to pause to remember who was who. I normally love books that have multiple POVs and jump around time and tell things in non-chronological order and rarely struggle with this. However with this book I just could not keep up at all.
And now the spoiler section:
-This book like … let’s white people off too easily? Yes there are a lot of harrowing scenes from Nella’s white bosses but they actually kind of drop out of the story towards the end. Richard is driving everything from the shadows but it’s Hazel who does all kinds of emotional damage to Nella. The most memorable bits of tension and horror come from Hazel. If I was following the story correctly this book is positing that there are black women working from the shadows to take down black women in offices with influence so there can only be one in each. The white villainous people are sort of sidelined in this to the point that I’m sure a lot of readers will hate certain black characters but forget that they white villains were even there. And I know that complicity is a thing but at the same time I’m still like…. A secret cabal of black women actively trying to bring other black women down? We’re finally starting to get super hyped up domestic thrillers fronted by Black female characters and this is one of the most hyped of all so far? Seriously??? (Note: I know there have always been thrillers with Black characters but this is the first I can recall getting a Gone Girl sort of media blitz if that makes sense.)
-In theory I liked that the driving force of everything was a hair serum that helps black women compartmentalize microaggressions and how it’s a road to hell being paved with good intentions sort of thing. However the fact that it was put in natural Black hair care products … yeah idk I didn’t like that. Especially since black hairstyles are so demonized it feels weird to almost literally demonize the hair are products. It also ends up going counter to the foreshadowing and creating mixed messages. There’s a very long flashback about all the effort Nella and her mother went to to relax their hair when she was a high school student. Nella then went on to cut her hair and stopped relaxing it and felt liberated/happy with that choice. You’d think the brainwashing agent would be in hair relaxing products after all that but … nope. Literally what is being conveyed here.
ETA: Looked up other reviews and saw one that said this might have been the choice over hair relaxers because nowadays white led media companies want to profit off images of “authentic blackness” and that it can get really predatory. That’s an interesting idea! Wondering if that was the intention …
-I also hated the reason Nella’s mind broke in the end. It was because she felt she deserved to be brainwashed because ….. she didn’t retweet videos of anti-black police brutality enough. Look, police brutality absolutely should be shouted about on social media, and protested against. Feeling perpetual guilt that you aren’t doing enough on your social media profiles is also a very, very real thing. However the narrative does not unpack this at all. It happens ten minutes from the end and right after that we are Nella as a mindless drone. Basically she’s punished by the narrative right on the heels of this personal revelation and something about this all strikes me as just … potentially incredibly cruel to black readers. It feels like it’s going “if you aren’t doing Extremely Online activism constantly then you don’t actually care about how your fellow Black people are being harmed.” Again I feel like this is another thing this book did to shift the burden from White supremacists over to Black victims. God forbid a black woman want to chill out online sometimes instead of retweeting the worst of the worst that can happen to Black people. Yes Nella did seem a little lost and there are legitimate reasons to be annoyed by her but at the same time…. I’m sorry but not being Extremely Online isn’t a crime. Sometimes people have to figure their shit out before they jump into activism. And oftentimes that activism won’t involve twitter. Despite what the media thinks most people aren’t on twitter actually.
-I know the author is a Black woman and this context makes me want to seek out other reviews as well as interviews to figure out her intentions. It’s entirely possible the bad vibes I got from this book is due to bad editing… frankly there’s a lot of it that should have tightened up for better pacing. And if I squint and ignore the non-Nella POVs and how confusing they were, there’s a good inter-office horror/drama in here. It’s just that the way it ended made me wonder what the intended message was here and it makes me wonder why this particular story (that doesn’t seem to believe in Black solidarity, that punishes the main character for not being on all the time, that demonizes natural hair care products) is the one that had multiple publishers proffering seven figures for it over other Black-centric thriller manuscripts that must be floating out there.
Rather, I can’t shake the feeling that it didn’t tackle these issues well at all, to the point that it came across as hostile to the possibility of friendship between black women for me. I’m white so it’s entirely possible there are nuances I’m missing here and I’m going to seek out other reviews on this book and might change my review if something changes my mind. But my initial feeling about this book is that… it kind of reminds me of White Ivy in a way. These are two domestic-ish thrillers that initially stand out because they’re about women of color in a genre that’s very dominated by white female characters in the suburbs. I did like White Ivy more than this one but I can’t shake the feeling that publishers were okay with these two books over other WoC thrillers because these books repackage pernicious stereotypes in the guise of social commentary. Again I could be reading this wrong and I’ll get into what I mean in the spoiler section but …. Yeah my first reaction after I set the book aside was “well that was messed up and not in the way I think it intended to be.”
It’s sort of hard to talk about the Other Black Girl without spoiling but here are the few thoughts I can have about it outside the spoiler cut.
-I actually liked the first third of then novel! I feel like it did horror best here actually, mostly because it nails that feeling of working in an office and being out of step every minute of the day. I have social anxiety so sometimes I’m second guessing everything while in the office. The thought of having to second guess everything because of micro aggressions really stuck with me and made for a really tense read.
-In the first third I also was very interested in the relationship between Nella and Hazel. The push and pull and the overall awkwardness was very interesting.
-Unfortunately the book doesn’t stay focused on Nella and Hazel. There are a lot of chapters from the POV of other characters and these chapters are incredible hard to follow. This killed any dread or momentum for me because I was having to pause to remember who was who. I normally love books that have multiple POVs and jump around time and tell things in non-chronological order and rarely struggle with this. However with this book I just could not keep up at all.
And now the spoiler section:
Spoiler
-This book like … let’s white people off too easily? Yes there are a lot of harrowing scenes from Nella’s white bosses but they actually kind of drop out of the story towards the end. Richard is driving everything from the shadows but it’s Hazel who does all kinds of emotional damage to Nella. The most memorable bits of tension and horror come from Hazel. If I was following the story correctly this book is positing that there are black women working from the shadows to take down black women in offices with influence so there can only be one in each. The white villainous people are sort of sidelined in this to the point that I’m sure a lot of readers will hate certain black characters but forget that they white villains were even there. And I know that complicity is a thing but at the same time I’m still like…. A secret cabal of black women actively trying to bring other black women down? We’re finally starting to get super hyped up domestic thrillers fronted by Black female characters and this is one of the most hyped of all so far? Seriously??? (Note: I know there have always been thrillers with Black characters but this is the first I can recall getting a Gone Girl sort of media blitz if that makes sense.)
-In theory I liked that the driving force of everything was a hair serum that helps black women compartmentalize microaggressions and how it’s a road to hell being paved with good intentions sort of thing. However the fact that it was put in natural Black hair care products … yeah idk I didn’t like that. Especially since black hairstyles are so demonized it feels weird to almost literally demonize the hair are products. It also ends up going counter to the foreshadowing and creating mixed messages. There’s a very long flashback about all the effort Nella and her mother went to to relax their hair when she was a high school student. Nella then went on to cut her hair and stopped relaxing it and felt liberated/happy with that choice. You’d think the brainwashing agent would be in hair relaxing products after all that but … nope. Literally what is being conveyed here.
ETA: Looked up other reviews and saw one that said this might have been the choice over hair relaxers because nowadays white led media companies want to profit off images of “authentic blackness” and that it can get really predatory. That’s an interesting idea! Wondering if that was the intention …
-I also hated the reason Nella’s mind broke in the end. It was because she felt she deserved to be brainwashed because ….. she didn’t retweet videos of anti-black police brutality enough. Look, police brutality absolutely should be shouted about on social media, and protested against. Feeling perpetual guilt that you aren’t doing enough on your social media profiles is also a very, very real thing. However the narrative does not unpack this at all. It happens ten minutes from the end and right after that we are Nella as a mindless drone. Basically she’s punished by the narrative right on the heels of this personal revelation and something about this all strikes me as just … potentially incredibly cruel to black readers. It feels like it’s going “if you aren’t doing Extremely Online activism constantly then you don’t actually care about how your fellow Black people are being harmed.” Again I feel like this is another thing this book did to shift the burden from White supremacists over to Black victims. God forbid a black woman want to chill out online sometimes instead of retweeting the worst of the worst that can happen to Black people. Yes Nella did seem a little lost and there are legitimate reasons to be annoyed by her but at the same time…. I’m sorry but not being Extremely Online isn’t a crime. Sometimes people have to figure their shit out before they jump into activism. And oftentimes that activism won’t involve twitter. Despite what the media thinks most people aren’t on twitter actually.
-I know the author is a Black woman and this context makes me want to seek out other reviews as well as interviews to figure out her intentions. It’s entirely possible the bad vibes I got from this book is due to bad editing… frankly there’s a lot of it that should have tightened up for better pacing. And if I squint and ignore the non-Nella POVs and how confusing they were, there’s a good inter-office horror/drama in here. It’s just that the way it ended made me wonder what the intended message was here and it makes me wonder why this particular story (that doesn’t seem to believe in Black solidarity, that punishes the main character for not being on all the time, that demonizes natural hair care products) is the one that had multiple publishers proffering seven figures for it over other Black-centric thriller manuscripts that must be floating out there.
dark
emotional
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This book dragged and dragged and dragged on.
Not only that but it jumped around like CRAZY and had flashback inceptions with no indicator that we were in a flashback until a few sentences in.
I kept trying to push thru to the big plot twist but I had to just stop reading. I couldn’t do another 20 pages of filler. I was falling asleep.
Skip this one and maybe just watch the tv show instead.
Not only that but it jumped around like CRAZY and had flashback inceptions with no indicator that we were in a flashback until a few sentences in.
I kept trying to push thru to the big plot twist but I had to just stop reading. I couldn’t do another 20 pages of filler. I was falling asleep.
Skip this one and maybe just watch the tv show instead.
Propulsive and suspenseful thriller set in the publishing industry dealing with office microaggressions and the fight for recognition in a predominately white field. Mainly a straight thriller but the whole plot centers on navigating an all white workplace and being Black, struggling with identity (too Black? not Black enough) and interBlack relationships.
There were a lot of negative reviews about the pacing but I found it to be just right. The build does take some time and most of the action is in the last quarter, but it was a perfect beginning-of-summer thriller for me and addressed social issues in a way I found illuminating!
There were a lot of negative reviews about the pacing but I found it to be just right. The build does take some time and most of the action is in the last quarter, but it was a perfect beginning-of-summer thriller for me and addressed social issues in a way I found illuminating!
dark
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I listened to the audiobook of this and I highly recommend it. This is Harris's first novel and I'm eager for her to write more!
I'll be thinking about this story for a long while -- the ending will linger. Great characters, great pacing.
I'll be thinking about this story for a long while -- the ending will linger. Great characters, great pacing.
adventurous
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This book was interesting. The big reveal was strange and I didn’t love how rushed/empty the ending was. It gave Get Out x Severance
I keep seeing the description of ‘Get Out meets The Stepford Wives.’ 100% accurate.