3 minute read
THE OTHER BLACK GIRL by Zakiya Dalila Harris
the other black girl
the Wildwater staff. Everyone involved is heavily armed, ruthless, and possessed of an irresistibly off-kilter sense of humor. Fans will know not to get too attached to supporting characters with half-lives shorter than that of fissionable uranium, which ends up making an appearance as well.
Supercharged intrigue for readers who’d rather get swept off their feet than think too hard about what’s going on.
THE STONE LOVES THE WORLD
Hall, Brian Viking (464 pp.) $28.00 | Jun. 8, 2021 978-0-59-329722-3
A young misfit—and her parents and grandparents—navigates through life in this scientifically minded novel.
A 20-year-old woman named Mette, overwhelmed by an abortive romantic entanglement, abruptly leaves the office of her tech job in New York and embarks on a bus trip to Seattle (a destination chosen at random), wondering whether to kill herself. Over the next few days, her parents become increasingly worried by her absence—or, at least, her mother does. Saskia, an unknown actress in New York City, raised Mette on her own after a brief fling with Mark, her astronomy professor in Ithaca, New York, and has always felt hurt by how much Mette is like her father— their predilection for math puzzles, their inability to read other people’s emotions. But when Saskia and Mark learn that Mette has somehow ended up in Denmark, they must reunite and find their daughter. Hall’s sprawling novel, which spans the years 1926 to 2017, isn’t plot-driven, however; instead, it’s largely composed of the characters’ dreamy reminiscences of their childhoods, their parents, their life’s trajectory, and limpid thoughts about the meaning of life: “It occurred to him that beauty, maybe, is always a thing you can only see from the outside. And he has wondered ever since if the key to a happy life is to learn ever more deeply to be satisfied with standing off to the side, perceiving the beauty that is separate from you, but nearly everywhere.” It’s also a book filled with left-brained precocity; besides Mark and Mette, we spend time in the minds of Mark’s father, a physicist who worked on the atomic bomb, and Mark’s mother, who wanted to be an astronomer but was foiled by the sexist norms of her day. Hall does an impressive job channeling his characters’ intensely idiosyncratic personal monologues and their interests in everything from Beethoven string quartets to the story of Joan of Arc to the Drake equation. And while the novel touches on an almost unwieldy array of themes, one constant throughout is the impossibility of exerting logic and control on a fundamentally unpredictable world.
A valiant attempt to encapsulate life, the universe, and everything.
THE OTHER BLACK GIRL
Harris, Zakiya Dalila Atria (368 pp.) $27.00 | Jun. 1, 2021 978-1-9821-6013-5
In Harris’ slyly brilliant debut, a young editorial assistant is thrilled when her glaringly White employer hires another Black woman—but it soon becomes clear there’s something sinister about the new girl, who isn’t what she
seems.
Young, literary, and ambitious, Nella Rogers has spent the last two years as an editorial assistant at Wagner Books, a premier New York City publishing house, where, for the entirety of her (somewhat stalled) tenure, she’s been the only Black person in the room. How she feels about this depends on the day—for all her frustrations, she can’t help but be a little proud of her outsider status—but still, she’s excited when she detects another Black girl on her floor: finally, someone else who gets it. And she does, at first. Wagner’s newest editorial assistant, Hazel-May
