.com Review
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An Best Book of August 2017: ( //www..com/b/?node=390919011
) Maria and Khalil are two biracial twenty-seven-year-olds living
together in late 90s Brooklyn. Maria is doing graduate work on
the Jonestown cult, and she’s planning their Martha’s Vineyard
wedding. Khalil is trying to get his startup off the ground. At
Stanford, Maria considered Khalil to be the “miscellaneous” black
kid surrounded by white kids. But they wound up a couple, brought
together in part by their similarly beige skin color. Now in
Brooklyn, they are striking out toward a comfortable existence
that would see them married, successful, living in a brownstone,
with a kid or two bearing cool urban names. They are even being
featured in a documentary called “New People,” about the sons and
daughters of interracial unions. But when Maria begins to obsess
about a quiet, talented black man, whom she refers to only as
“the Poet,” the story really begins to open up. Acute
observations on race, status, and the choices we make—as well as
some clever set pieces—make this an entertaining,
thought-provoking read. While the story follows a relatively
simple line, there is a lot going on thematically, and that
causes the narrative to judder a time or two; but this is a novel
you’ll find yourself pondering the day after you’ve finished, and
probably the day after that. --Chris Schluep, Book Review
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Review
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Named A 2017 BEST SUMMER READ BY
Vogue • Elle • Esquire • Harper's Bazaar • Glamour • Buzzfeed •
In Style • Men's Journal • Bustle • Ms. Magazine • Pop
Sugar • Newsday • The Millions • Time Out • Bitch • CNN's The
Lead
"[Senna] explore[s] what happens when races and cultures mingle
in the home — and under the skin...Her new novel, the sinister
and charming New People, riffs on the themes she’s made her own —
with a twist. It’s a novel that reads us. It anticipates, and
sidesteps, lazy reading and sentimental expectations… The
material is hot but the style stays cool… Senna’s is precise
and devastating…There is no easy consolation in New People. But
in its insistence on being read on its own terms, its commitment
to complexity, it does something better than describe freedom. It
enacts it.” –New York Times
"[A] cutting take on race and class…part dark comedy, part
surreal morality tale. Disturbing and delicious.” –People
“An of-the-moment novel [that] tackles identity and
inuation…slender but powerful, as seductive and urgent as a
phone call from an old flame. At first blush, the book seems like
a straightforward love story…but it’s more complicated than that…
This is not a book about race disguised as a romance, nor is it a
love story saddled with a moral. Senna’s achievement is that she
interlaces both threads in one ingenious tale.” –O, the Oprah
Magazine
"You’ll gulp Senna’s novel in a single sitting—but then mull over
it for days.” –Entertainment Weekly
“Slick and highly enjoyable…Thrillingly, blackness is not
hallowed in Senna’s work, nor is it impervious to pathologies of
ego. Senna particularly enjoys lampooning the search for racial
authenticity...Identity, far from being a point of solidarity, is
a beckoning void, and adroit comedy quickly liquefies into absurd
horror.” –New Yorker
“Danzy Senna delivers her finest and funniest work yet…[she]
writes with a dexterous command of character and language. And
she unleashes a razor-sharp sense of humor that take at and
slices through notions of political correctness, identity
politics and hypocrisy…achingly funny...and deeply
affecting." –Essence
“A darkly comic novel about race, about false utopias, and about
the fine line between seemingly innocuous, everyday
groupthink—the kind that’s the price of admission for being part
of a marriage, or a band of friends, or a tribe of any sort....
Senna writes beautifully about the complexity of identity, the
intersection of racial consciousness, and class awareness, and
individual perspective.” –Vogue
“Senna’s thriller-like novel is a stirring exploration of race
and identity, and, a propulsive look at a fantasy playing out
before one’s eyes.” –Esquire
“Compulsively readable.” –Buzzfeed Books
“It says a great deal for New People — Danzy Senna’s
martini-dry, espresso-dark comedy of contemporary manners — that
its compound of caustic observations and shrewd characterizations
could only have emerged from a writer as finely tuned to her
social milieu as [Jane] Austen was to hers… artfully strewn with
excruciating and uproarious misperceptions…[New People] doesn’t
pour cold water on one’s expectations for a better, more tolerant
world. In fact, it implies that world has, to a great extent,
already arrived.” –Newsday
“Set in the Rodney King-era ‘90s, New People is as mesmerizingly
fast-paced as it is deeply reflective of monumental truths that
resonate perhaps even more powerfully two decades in the future.”
–Harper’s Bazaar
“The thorniness of desire is inextricably intertwined here with
the fraught history of race in America, and, as in Senna’s
previous work, she s to satirize characterizations of racial
identity at every turn… Maria’s deliberate refusal to embrace a
more hopeful future keeps eating away at her, leaving her in a
potentially ruinous fix by the end of her unresolved story. And
yet that refusal — and this novel — is also an antidote to the
attempt to dismiss continuing racial inequalities within a
narrative of progress. Yes, right now, it’s knotty, and
uncomfortable, and depressing. And we must not look away.” –San
Francisco Chronicle
“A darkly comic psychological thriller…Senna’s antiheroine is
winningly vulnerable... and New People is at its best when it
delves into the worlds of Maria’s construction, or
reconstruction… [she] wanders the city in a daze, ricocheting
from bad decision to bad decision, barely dreaming at all. Her
life seems like it will never make room for the answers she
seeks, and Senna enjoys every second she takes to make that
clear.” –Village Voice
“A provocative conversation starter...with bite and brains…
invigorating.” –Paste Magazine
“Sharp.” –Boston Globe
"The frankness with which New People treats race as a kind of
public performance is both uncomfortable and strangely cathartic.
... Provocative." –Wall Street Journal
“Agile and ambitious... a wild-hearted romance about secrets and
obsessions, a dramedy of manners about educated middle-class
blacks – the talented tenth – that is Senna’s authorial home
ground.” –Elle
“A paean to the psychosocial complexities of being racially
mixed…The novel’s ultimate message seems...to be one both true
and unsettling, if unsurprising: that color-lines have never left
America and likely never will.” –Los Angeles Review of Books
“Oooooo, this book! Senna has created an engrossing story of
race and class in contemporary America…It’s fantastic! You can
practically hear it sizzle in your hands.” –BookRiot
“A thoughtful, earnest, witty discussion on race.” –Marie Claire
“A brilliant, thoughtful treatise on race and identity in the
21st century.” –Pop Sugar
“[A] taut novel about a couple grappling with guilt, race, and
desire in the late ‘90s.” –Esquire
“Compellingly provocative… [Senna] creat[es] a dense
psychological portrait of a black woman nearing the close of the
20th century: inquisitive, obsessive, imaginative, alive." –New
Republic
“Senna’s meditation on 1996 America and its false sense of
progress is an eerie picture of society today, too. With a dark
sense of humor, Senna builds her story with a horror-like tension
that releases with a tongue-in-cheek sigh. Sure to keep readers
riding white-knuckled to the end.” –Booklist
“Danzy Senna’s latest stunner of a novel is both political and
bingeable, worthy of a one-sitting read” –Vulture
“Provocative…Expertly plotted and full of dark humor, New
People is a thoughtful and unforgettable look at race and class
at the dawn of the 21st century.” –BookPage
“Danzy Senna’s latest novel is the best of her writing. It’s
rich, nuanced, and in some respects, y. The question at its
core is: What happens when your perfect life isn’t
enough?” –Bitch
“A striking, off-kilter exploration of race and
class.” –Huffington Post
“[New People] will catch readers off guard with its plot twists
and almost too-relatable characters. Senna uses light humor to
balance disturbing events that present Maria with more than a few
reality checks.” –Ms. Magazine
“New People will challenge your assumptions about how you define
yourself and others.”
–HelloGiggles
“An achievement in so many ways. It succeeds, to begin with, in
capturing the psyche of a woman worn down by expectation. It also
convincingly distills the essence of an “intentional community”
in bohemian black Brooklyn. And it manages to send up the
literary tropes of biracial representation, in particular that of
the “tragic mulatto,” a mixed-race person who’s traumatized by
their inability to fit neatly into distinct racial categories and
their attendant social schema. Senna plugs that legendary trope
into the classic humor machine. …With New People, Senna appears
to have written the book she was waiting for.” –The Baffler
“An absolutely brilliant darkly comic wild ride of a novel—it’s
completely fearless and subversive while at the same time
incredibly honest and accurate in how it approaches race and
class.” --Porochista Khakpour, LitHub
“A darkly comic page-turner.” –Los Angeles Daily News
“A lively, biting novel about the heavy burdens of racial
self-consciousness and the perils of an identity forged by the
assumptions of others.” –1843 Magazine
"Senna’s latest novel, New People, occupies the uneasy space
between horror and humor.”
–Vineyard Gazette
“One of the very most interesting social writers the 21st century
has yet to produce...Senna explodes American conceptions of class
and race in ways that will make readers completely
uncomfortable.” –Seattle Weekly
"A great read, both compelling and thoughtful. The narrative has
a page-turning urgency, as Maria tumbles toward a disaster of her
own making.” –Library Journal (starred)
“Senna's fearless novel is equal parts beguiling and disturbing…
[she] combines the clued-in status details you'd find in a New
York magazine article with the narrative invention of big-league
fiction…. Every detail and subplot…is resonant. A great book
about race and a great book all around.” –Kirkus Reviews
(starred)
“Remarkable. New People plays out like Greek tragedy and social
comedy all at once, reminding you that the worst kind of hell is
always the one we raise.” –Marlon James, author of A Brief
History of Seven Killings
“New People sparkles with precision, and with antic and merciless
hilarity. I was seduced into reading it in one sitting, but will
be thinking about it for a long time to come. This book—utterly
grave, and yet beautifully light-hearted--is a wonder.
–Rachel Kushner, author of The Flame Throwers
"I stayed up way later than planned to finish New People, Danzy
Senna’s riveting, take-no-prisoners, dystopic dream of a novel.
More scorcher than satire, New People loads identity, race,
despair, and desire into a blender then hits high. Get ready to
stay up late, to be propelled, pricked, and haunted."
–Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts
"Danzy Senna detonates the bomb between respectability and
desire. In hypnotizing prose, New People kicks you in the gut,
then sings you a lullaby. Read this and be haunted. Senna is a
master."
–Mat Johnson, author of Loving Day
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