Notes on Her Color

December 1, 2022

In Nigerian British author Agbaje-Williams's auction-hot The Three of Us, a heretofore contented wife discovers the acrimony between her husband and best friend as they dance around her for first place in her attention (75,000-copy first printing). Inaugural winner of the Chautauqua Janus Prize, Cuffy structures Dances according to the basics of ballet as her Black heroine rises to become a principal dancer at the New York City Ballet while struggling with personal issues. From a staff writer at New York magazine's "The Strategist," Denton-Hurst's Homebodies features a young Black woman fired from her media job who writes a scorching denunciation of the racism and sexism she encountered in the business that goes viral (75,000-copy first printing). In Pushcart Prize-nominated Neal's Notes on Her Color a young Black Indigenous woman gifted with the ability to change the color of her skin finds self-respect (and a means of escaping crushing family expectations) with a queer, dark-skinned piano instructor. In What Napoleon Could Not Do, from Ghanian-born Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate Nnuro, Ghanian computer programmer Jacob can't win permission from the U.S. government to move to Virginia to be with his wife while Jacob's sister Belinda is married to a wealthy Black Texan who tries to apprise Jacob of the country's deep-seated racism (50,000-copy first printing). Drawn from her family's experience, Pushcart Prize-winning Oza's A History of Burning opens with Pirbhai's being taken from India to work on the East African Railway for the British and moves toward the expulsion of his descendants from Uganda in 1972 (50,000-copy first printing)

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March 15, 2023
A young woman who can change her skin color searches for belonging and freedom from a difficult home life through music. "My mother could change the color of her skin": Gabrielle, the narrator, has inherited this gift, which she calls "passing." Gabrielle is about to graduate from high school in Florida as the novel opens, and though her color-changing has been largely out of her control, she's managed to keep her condition unnoticed by everyone but her parents. Her father, a Black lawyer with aspirations to be the perfect Republican, prefers that both Gabrielle and her mother (who is Black and Indigenous) pass as White when he gets home from work, to match their house's all-white interior. "There were no dark things allowed in our home--except for whiskey, and him," Gabrielle tells us. When Gabrielle's father decides she should be pre-med at the University of Florida--"It's very competitive," a campus tour guide tells them. "But it's a great program"--he demands she take a year off after high school to work on her extracurricular activities, giving her a better shot at admission. She begins taking piano lessons from Dominique, a young Jamaican woman whose brightly colored home and vibrant family life are everything Gabrielle wishes her own could be. Organized into parts corresponding to movements in Mahler's Symphony No. 3, Neal's narrative takes us through Gabrielle's struggle to understand who she truly is and what she wants at the same time that her family irrevocably shatters. Like Gabrielle herself, though, the novel never quite settles on how to present itself, and many questions of narrative logic--characters' motivations and histories, how Gabrielle's passing works--go unanswered. Falls short of a magnum opus but with enough lovely notes to make it worth a look.

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April 1, 2023
A year out of high school, Gabrielle has only known the cold, patriarchal system of her household. She and her mother, Tallulah, have a unique ability: they can change the color of their skin. Gabrielle learns to keep her skin white to appease her father, matching their white walls, white cupboards, and even the pale food they eat. This secret keeps Gabrielle and Tallulah close despite differing values. After years of being oppressed by her husband, Tallulah suffers a mental breakdown and tries to kill herself, forcing Gabrielle to own her power and become more independent for the first time. Music is the one area where Gabrielle has always been able to express herself, and her piano teacher, a queer, dark-skinned, confident woman--everything her father abhors--encourages Gabrielle's creativity and helps her to open up and grow into her own identity. In this coming-of-age debut, exceptional storyteller Neal paints a picture of racism and patriarchy in suburban Florida and one young woman's journey to break free from it all.

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