BROWN GIRLS by Daphne Palasi Andreades

lonely outsider status echoes through Zuhour’s never-ending dreams and thoughts.

Nostalgia and longing conveyed through abstract metaphors and interior dialogue.

BROWN GIRLS

Andreades, Daphne Palasi Random House (224 pp.) $24.00 | Jan. 4, 2022 978-0-593-24342-8

A masterfully executed ode to brown girls on their journeys of becoming. Andreades’ debut novel is a unique coming-of-age story screamed, sung, howled, hummed by “we,” a first-person plural narrator representing a group of friends from Queens, New York, on the cusp of womanhood. Writing in vignettes, with language that is as punchy as it is lyrical and impassioned, Andreades explores intersectional issues of womanhood, race, and class. Her chorus asks what it means to embody both the colonized and the colonizer: as American children of immigrant parents who speak English better than their mother tongue. As students at Columbia University who worry about undocumented family back in Queens. As people who realize that home will always mean two places at once. Andreades skillfully navigates multiple literary and political challenges. The novel successfully argues for a specifically American identity politics that eschews nationality or geographic region for a common experience of marginalization. The brown girls have roots in such diverse places as Ghana, India, and Mexico yet can believably speak as one chorus. To pull off a novel with basically no individual characters or character development that conveys an intimate story of becoming— a bildungsroman—is no easy feat. This book is (unbelievably!) a page-turner; Andreades accomplishes this with the energy and joyful beauty of her prose, which keeps the book moving at a reckless pace. Andreades’ brown girls speak with one voice without being reductionist. She pays homage to the brown girls who have left Queens and those who have stayed, straight and gay, teen murder victim and thriving career woman, parent and intentionally childless: The list goes on and on.

Singing as one, Andreades’ brown girls create and capture the voice of a generation.

HOMESICKNESS

Barrett, Colin Grove Press (224 pp.) $27.00 | May 3, 2022 978-0-8021-5964-9

Eight richly descriptive stories examine the various textures of disappointment in families and communities where success is not the norm. The stories in Barrett’s second collection, set in present-day Ireland and Canada, reveal a different sort of malaise than the title might suggest: Their characters are not so much longing for home as sickened by a place of psychological damage and, frequently, senseless violence. In the opening story, “A Shooting in Rathreedane,” that violence, as well as Barrett’s pitchdark sense of humor, is on full display, as police officers in County Mayo head out to a farm to investigate the shooting of a young miscreant, “one of those prolific, inveterately

small-time crooks who possessed real criminal instincts but no real criminal talent,” and who this time around was attempting to siphon oil from an empty fuel tank. Barrett nimbly balances the pathos of the situation with its troubling ridiculousness. “The Alps,” set during an increasingly drunken evening at a country football clubhouse, stretches out to include not just the three “shortish” brothers sporting the “bloodshot eyes, pouched necks and capitulating hairlines of middle age” whose nickname gives the story its title, but the whole community of drinkers in the bar and the mysterious sword-wielding stranger who invades their space. The collection’s long concluding story, “The 10,” watches dispassionately as waves of disappointment ripple outward from a young man, once a potential football star and now selling cars at his father’s Nissan dealership, into the lives of his family, friends, and girlfriend. The fine distinctions of social class in his community are as clearly noted as the protagonist’s subtle changes of mood. Barrett’s playfully extravagant language makes the depressing stories more palatable even as it distances the reader from the plights of the characters.

This sharply observant collection resists pigeonholing its recalcitrant characters.

IT DIES WITH YOU

Blackburn, Scott Crooked Lane (304 pp.) $26.99 | June 7, 2022 978-1-64385-939-2

An unexpected inheritance from his father thrusts an ordinary Joe into a shady criminal world. After a post-prizefight brawl leads to a suspension for rising North Carolina boxer Hudson Miller, he decides to keep body and soul together by taking a job as a bouncer at the Red Door Taproom. The news that Hudson’s father, Leland, has been shot and killed in an apparent botched robbery hits Hudson hard despite their estrangement. And