A review by jesshindes
Assembly by Natasha Brown

challenging emotional funny tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

Natasha Brown's Assembly is short - a short novella - barely longer than short story length. It tells the story of a nameless narrator, who - like Brown - is a Black woman who went to Oxbridge and then into the City, following two days of her life at work and then her journey into the countryside to visit her white boyfriend's parents for a family party. So far, so simple; but Assembly packs an incredible punch into its 100 or so pages. It's a story about participating in systems that don't respect you; that require you to fit yourself into a different shape in order to achieve what the system tells you is success. It's about the hundreds of microaggressions that shape the narrator's experience in her high-powered job, and about the white men around her who perpetrate them sometimes deliberately, sometimes completely unawares. It's about what happens to the narrator internally as she puts her head down and lifts her hands up to climb the corporate ladder, and about her desperation - articulated in a shock decision - to escape.

Clearly, I don't have a lot of experience of the milieu that Brown describes. I've never worked a corporate job and I had a ton of privilege and confidence to support me through my Oxbridge experience. But one of the triumphs of this book is the efficiency with which she issues descriptions: I could see every single member of her cast, often after just one or two sentences (and a lot of this work is done very effectively through dialogue or free indirect speech). I felt like I understood the world she was showing me and I was grateful for her skill and her surgical precision in depicting it.
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