RaveNew York Times Book ReviewRemarkable ... She repositions various narratives about race and medicine — the soaring Black maternal mortality rates; the rise of heart disease and hypertension; the oft-repeated dictum that Black people reject psychological therapy — as evidence not of Black inferiority, but of racism in the health care system ... Singular and expansive ... Under the Skin offers an alternative understanding of...suffering, for which there is a long history. Black pain is not, and has never been, the fault of the individual, but a result of the structural racism embedded in the practice of medicine in this country ... In this eminently admirable book, there are no easy answers or platitudes.
Raven Leilani
PositiveVQR... nothing if not an ambitious work ... Leilani manages to write of Edie’s desire and experience of sex with a clarity and conciseness that is rare in fiction ... Edie lends her voice to one of the defining refrains of the past seven years of black women’s writing. The favorite topic—creating a taxonomy of white people and white behaviors and microaggressions ... Edie is a confounding character. And this, too, makes her a challenging flaneur ... Yet this hyperawareness does not lead to action or change on Edie’s part. On the contrary, it seems to stun her into a kind of paralysis ... In that the novel begins to falter, as Edie’s self-loathing and disgust mixed with longing toward her adopted family occurs again and again, the same crescendo and intensity of waves for the reader. I do not think it is in Leilani’s desire, as a writer, to have her heroine reach an emotional epiphany ... Edie and the rhythms of this novel make so much more sense when you understand them as the pace of a dogged, incessant traveler, watching the worlds she passes through and making rude notes about them, simply to assert the uncomfortable truth that she was there at all.
Bridgett M, Davis
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewDavis includes wonderful details about growing up as the daughter of a numbers runner ... Davis lovingly describes a childhood full of creature comforts ... But she juxtaposes nearly every detail of the good life with the slow decay of Detroit around her ... Davis accomplishes this through archival research ... Especially exhilarating is her history of lotteries ... Davis’s book is accessible, her language plain and direct. She has a cleareyed understanding of what it means to be poor and what kind of opportunities money creates ...The World According to Fannie Davis would make a thrilling film ... We need more stories like Fannie’s—the triumph and good life of a lucky black woman in a deeply corrupt world.
Laird Hunt
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewReading this, I couldn’t help thinking of the James Baldwin quote: 'If Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they would never have needed to invent .?.?. "the Negro problem."?' In Ottie Lee, Hunt has created a sly comment on the narrative of lynching in American history ... Ottie Lee is an uncomfortable exploration of the bystander: the kind of young woman so often seen in those horrific lynching postcards, turning to the camera and grinning. Through her we see the interior life of a person who could pose like that and the type of environment that could produce that picture ... In [certain] moments, it seems possible that Hunt intended to write a sort of reconciliation fantasy. But fantasy not grounded in actual social dynamics and the facts of life is merely escape...Rather than subverting standard racial narratives, scenes like this lead to incredulity and the sense that the characters are little more than game pieces ... These missteps are regrettable. In exploring the mind-set and complicity of the bystander and the connection between white women and black women in a racist, patriarchal culture, Hunt has addressed some especially timely issues.
