Hannaham combines both modes — wicked satire and selected allusions to The Odyssey and its progeny — to create a scathing, heartbreaking takedown of the carceral system ... Carlotta’s prison-inflected Black vernacular may draw criticism from those who find it challenging to parse...or who question whether Hannaham, a Black gay man, can authentically channel a Black Colombian trans woman’s experience. But the author has always done the work required to write diverse characters ... Carlotta’s bold voice hooks readers from the beginning, making them willing ride-or-dies ... Hannaham hasn’t merely given the classics an update; he has given readers an unforgettable glimpse into the injustices the carceral system heaps on women like Carlotta — and deftly made space in literature for a distinctive voice that deserves a place in the modern literary pantheon. All hail, and may the gods prosper Carlotta Mercedes!
We may understand its mechanisms, but Hannaham’s bumper-car narrative still astonishes ... Carlotta’s internal dialogue is always breaking into the third-person narrative midsentence, punctuation be damned. But her stream of consciousness keeps pace with the frenetic action of the story; her interjections feel seamless after a few pages ... Hannaham’s mix of humor and horror works because of Carlotta’s interjections in the narration, which have the effect of tempering catastrophe and reimagining the mundane. Notwithstanding her in-your-face tragedies, past and pending, Carlotta’s voice is captivating. Throughout the novel, she rediscovers Brooklyn and doesn’t withhold on the changes she confronts ... In his fiction, Hannaham has demonstrated an abundance of empathy for the sexual minorities he writes about ... we often circle the Same Old Anger, Usual Frustrations and Somebody Oughtas, but her idiosyncratic wit injects freshness and pathos to the issues ... At a time when families with trans and gay children feel persecuted by state governments, Hannaham makes Carlotta heroic ... Don’t let the title of this wondrous novel fool you. Hannaham cares deeply about Carlotta. From a mash-up of perspectives, he writes like a guardian angel. Or — as our narrator says of Carlotta, when she’s feeling elated — 'like a drag queen doing a layup.'
Sharp social commentary intermingles with what is very nearly slapstick humor ... Carlotta is merely human; nevertheless, her narrative voice crackles with energy, shifting between first and third person and suggesting an imagined voice-over for the miniseries she pictures for her story--with her occasional direct interjections. Her struggles to comply with the terms of her parole, avoid being around alcohol during Independence Day celebrations and find employment are at times wonderfully farcical, particularly the plan she comes up with after having been hired as a driver in spite of never having gotten a license ... In the vibrant persona of Carlotta, Hannaham once again presents a thrilling voice. Readers, at least, will prove the title wrong.
James Hannaham’s novel is besotted with the stories and local legends of Brooklyn, and the perspective of a returning native on the borough’s galloping gentrification is irresistible. So there’s some light satire on the crafty white boutiques displacing the businesses Carlotta grew up with; this provides distraction from the intensity of the trauma she lives with, even if it doesn’t really strengthen the novel ... Still, Carlotta’s passion for life is unstoppable. Her story beats on, the narrative third person regularly bursting open into a surging stream of consciousness ... Carlotta’s charm and zest allow the reader at times to forget the horror she has lived through, although Hannaham does not stint on some appalling abuse. To end a story like this with a self-consciously Joycean affirmation might seem inappropriate – and yet his heroine’s dauntless spirit means that when it comes, the 'Yes honey, I do, honey, I’m a say Yes motherfucker' is wholly fitting.
Though the narrative skips deftly between first and close third person, we never think that the author (or the narrator) is speaking directly to us, or that we are seeing or being encouraged to feel anything other than what Carlotta sees and feels. The rhythms, the vocabulary, the barbed observations and flashes of insight strike us as flawless transmissions of the voice she’s hearing inside her head.
Echoes another linguistically brilliant novel, James Joyce’s Ulysses. Yet Hannaham...has created a gloriously original character with an unmistakable voice and an unforgettable story.
A timely if sometimes frustrating depiction of life on the edges of America’s prison-industrial complex ... Carlotta’s series of antic encounters with family members, her parole officer, and old friends from the neighborhood doesn’t amount to much of a story, but it gives plenty of opportunities for Carlotta to riff and grouse ... She has plenty of wit and verve, and readers are sure to cheer on Carlotta’s doomed efforts to stay clean and out of trouble, but, even so, the underplotted chronicle tends to lag. It’s fun for a while, but it’s not the author’s best.
Much of the novel takes place in the twenty-four hours after Carlotta’s release, and its style, which abruptly toggles between free indirect discourse and unmediated access to Carlotta’s thoughts and speech without any punctuation to signal the switch, crackles with a deeply felt urgency as she tries to make sense of a new world that has been so quickly built upon the old one ... Given this synopsis, one might expect a gentrification novel, a prison novel, a trans novel, or simply an imitation of Joyce. Hannaham manages to avoid these generic conventions—for better and sometimes for worse—by exceeding them. To read Hannaham, a Black queer writer himself, is to encounter and explore a mind that takes irreverence seriously ... Brusquely funny and subtly devastating, the novel is often quite playful even as it’s levying shrewd critiques of evils ranging from mass incarceration to being misgendered...Even so, as Black trans aesthetics continue to largely be forged through poetics, visual art, and memoir rather than fiction, to ask one day in the life of Carlotta Mercedes to make significant inroads in the representation of Black trans life might be one thing too much to ask of a novel with so many weighty concerns ... Hannaham, though cis, certainly bucks tradition by rendering his protagonist as a complicated human rather than a stereotype. This is admirable but a tension similar to the one Barbara Smith locates in the difference between living as a lesbian and writing within lesbianism arises in representations of trans experience written by cis authors. There might be no satisfying resolution to this conundrum yet, but, before a Black trans novel tradition has been firmly established, the Carlottas that we are given might finally force more of us to actually give a shit about them.
