Carole V. Bell

FictionSatireLiterary Fiction

Danzy Senna tried writing for TV. Instead, she wrote ‘Colored Television’

Interview by Carole V. Bell

Over two decades of writing books, author Danzy Senna (Caucasia and New People) faced the same obstacle again and again: “I kept coming up against the problem of my work being uncategorizable and me being uncategorizable.” At 53, Senna has earned critical acclaim, but she’s still keenly conscious of “being a writer who doesn’t fit into the binary world” in terms of how the American public consumes art and how publishing companies package race and fiction for publicity. As someone of mixed race who writes about the complexities of race, sex and class, she explores subjects that the industry has yet to gain comfort handling.

At the same time, living in Los Angeles, Senna was constantly aware of the “glittering television world” surrounding her. This parallel cultural universe was not just co-existing with the scruffier literary world she inhabited; it had “sort of taken over everything in our public conversation.”

Curious about what lay beyond the literary landscape, Senna decided to dip into television writing—and in the process, she found the seed for her fourth novel, Colored Television.  Speaking to BookPage by video call from a sunny, mid-century modern den in her home, Senna talked about the origins of her novel, and how her life, past and present, has fed into her art.

“It was almost to the point where they were like ‘Oh, mulattoes. That could be good.’”

At first, there was just a kernel, an observation about her TV meetings: There was something inherently humorous and provocative about them. The network employees Senna met with were just sort of “cravenly thinking” of Senna’s mixed identity. “It’s almost pure, in a way, compared to the literary world—the way they think about how to market you.” Tongue only sort of in cheek, Senna remarks with a chuckle, “It was almost to the point where they were like ‘Oh, mulattoes. That could be good.’”

Then, a few years ago, Senna recalls, in the midst of the renaissance of television, and an accompanying hunger for diversity on screen, the story of struggling literary writer Jane Gibson came to her nearly fully formed. “I thought it would be funny if this character kind of hit a wall [as a novelist] and was ready to sell her soul to Hollywood.”

While there are “autobiographical undercurrents” in the book, Senna has a way of mining experience as a starting point and then letting the imagination and satire take flight. In writing fiction, “I’m looking for the story that didn’t happen within the story that did . . . taking a shred of truth and then mining it for the fictional possibilities,” she says. Her softly cutting, satirical sensibility is a key part of Senna’s brand and drives the process of transforming experience into fiction through embellishment and intentional provocation.

“I thought of him as being born out of people who would have been inspired by Fred Hampton. And now he’s like, working for a streaming service.”

The novel gains further complexity through its supporting characters, whose takes on making and selling art amid American racial dynamics represent different parts of Senna’s own experiences and perspective. One of these characters is Hampton Ford, a successful Black producer Jane meets with. While his name calls to mind the HBCU Hampton University and ties him to civil rights activist and Black Panther member Fred Hampton, it’s meant to be a bit ironic, conveying a certain kind of racial consciousness, while also drawing a contrast between Hampton’s upbringing and where he landed. “I thought of him as being born out of people who would have been inspired by Fred Hampton,” says Senna. “And now he’s like, working for a streaming service.”

As Senna explains, Hampton’s perspective is defined by “fear and the idea of scarcity,” a sense of precarity even in times of success. It’s the realization that, while “the white gaze looks at you [now] and says that you’re valuable,” as a Black artist, you know that being in vogue and in demand may not last: “A year from now, they may have moved on.” Senna says that this “sense of fleeting interest in your story” cultivates “a kind of desperation . . . that I think every writer of color has felt.” In the wake of the publishing industry’s retrenchment from its promises during 2020’s vaunted summer of racial reckoning, it’s easy to see how this perspective is reflected in a broader social reality.

While Senna is sympathetic to Hampton, her satire cuts sharper in other places. One of Colored Television’s defining passages is a gutting of a certain kind of tokenized nonwhite, neoconservative thinker often celebrated in white circles—a type exemplified by Thomas Chatterton Williams, a writer for The Atlantic who previously thought of himself as Black but no longer does. Williams once declared to Senna, she reveals, that her own identification as Black was “a legacy of slavery.” In the novel, Jane delivers the perfect takedown of Williams’ disavowal of race: “Once you declared you didn’t believe in race, it seemed, you had to declare this rather banal idea everywhere you went—so it became a way of believing in race even as you pretended not to believe in race. It was an ‘out damn spot’ situation—the more you tried to wash your hands of race, the more the bloody spots emerged.”

Senna’s point of view is informed by growing up as a mixed-race girl in Boston, where she came of age in the 1970s and ’80s. As she so effectively captured in her 2009 memoir, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? A Personal History, those were turbulent and difficult times for her family and their community. Boston was infamously resistant to integration. “It was like [what] my mother calls . . . the ‘Deep North,’” she says. To get across what it was like to be a mixed-race person or a Black person in Boston at the time, she says, “you would have to say you were from Alabama in the ’50s . . . it was so racially fraught.”

Senna’s mother, poet Fanny Howe, is a prolific writer from a wealthy, white New England family. Her accomplished editor father, Carl Senna, is a Black man from a somewhat murky, unrecorded working class background in the South. The two had a contentious divorce when Senna was 7. After living through that tension, when it came time to apply to college, to Senna it felt “like leaving the scene of a crime.” She applied to schools in California, and chose to attend Stanford University, just outside Palo Alto and thousands of miles away from the difficulties of home.

Senna’s memoir was a bit of her own personal reckoning, and it stirred up pain that stuck around for a while. Today, she looks back on her hometown with equanimity, saying, “I go back and I sort of have a lot of affection for it.” The older she gets, the more she realizes, “that was a formative thing. I don’t think I would have had the same level of politics and consciousness had I been raised in a different kind of environment.”

She’s also glad to have returned to writing fiction, which gets her “closer to these eternal and subconscious truths about race and family. The problem with memoir is you can stick to the facts, but the truth of the story changes over time. Your relationship to the facts changes. . . . So the true story is always changing, but the made-up one remains true.”

Read our review of Colored Television.

In the author's biting and hilarious fourth novel, a literary writer pushing the limits of her patience and her pocketbook gives Hollywood a shot.
Mystery & SuspenseMysteryHistorical Mystery

A Ruse of Shadows

Review by Carole V. Bell

Have you ever wondered about the aftermath of a great detective’s big case or how the damage reverberates among the grieving families of murder mysteries? In Sherry Thomas’s irresistible eighth Lady Sherlock mystery, A Ruse of Shadows, Charlotte Holmes solves several interlocking puzzles, bringing justice to characters who were collateral damage in previous installments in the series.

In the beginning, things look bleak for the inimitable Miss Holmes, the real genius behind the celebrated consulting detective Sherlock Holmes. Charlotte is a person of interest in the murder of Lord Bancroft Ashburton and, as one of the last people to see the victim alive, she faces questioning by two of Scotland Yard’s finest: upright Inspector Treadles and retired Chief Inspector Talbot. It’s a sticky wicket for both Treadles and Charlotte: She is the adored partner of the victim’s brother, Lord Ingram Ashburton (“Ash”), who happens to be Treadles’ friend as well. Charlotte also recently cleared Treadles from a false murder indictment.

As a result of Charlotte’s investigative efforts, the formerly powerful Bancroft had been exiled to Ravensmere, “a cushioned facility for sensitive prisoners,” for selling the Crown’s secrets. And yet, just weeks prior to his death, Bancroft summoned Charlotte and coerced her into tracking down his missing henchman, Mr. Underwood. Multiple murders and twists ensue as friends, foes and loved ones of earlier victims return and plot strands get brilliantly tied together in a case that serves as a culmination of everything that’s occurred in the series so far. 

The twists are creative and compelling; it’s always rewarding to watch Charlotte’s mind work and see how she wrests control from men who would use her. But her emotional journey alongside Ash is the real centerpiece of the novel. Now divorced, Ash is finding his way in his newly unconventional life. While cushioned by his gender, wealth and privilege, he has still become a social anomaly: “the Upper Ten Thousand was not accustomed to recently divorced men at their social functions and his presence had caused some tongues to wag.” He’s taking cues from his unorthodox better half, who is unlikely to ever want to marry, but Ash still worries about his children’s reputations. Yet, this is the happiest readers have ever seen the couple. Their relationship blooms in intimate moments, culminating in the series’ most satisfying scenes ever. With Ash and Charlotte’s flame burning higher and hotter, A Ruse of Shadows is an unmissable high point in a joyfully original historical mystery series with a romantic twist.

A Ruse of Shadows is an unmissable high point of Sherry Thomas’ Lady Sherlock, a joyfully original historical mystery series with a romantic twist.
FictionLiterary Fiction

One of Our Kind

Review by Carole V. Bell

Bestselling young adult author Nicola Yoon’s first book for adults is a provocative mashup of body snatcher horror in the vein of The Stepford Wives, with the intraracial introspection of Ellis Cose’s The Rage of a Privileged Class. 

One of Our Kind is built around the complex truth that while white liberal guilt is more remarked on in popular culture, the angst of the Black middle class is just as powerful. Jasmyn Williams is, in many ways, a lucky woman. As a public defender, she has work that matters, as well as a loving husband, an adorable 6-year-old son she cherishes and a second child on the way. And yet, as successful as both Jasmyn and her husband, King, are, they live in the shadow of racist violence. The solution King suggests is relocating to Liberty, a utopian Black enclave just outside Los Angeles. 

Moving to an elite outpost isn’t an easy choice for Jasmyn, but she never could have anticipated the danger that would unfold in this idyllic retreat. Black folks in Liberty seem strangely culturally whitewashed, and are apathetic about Black lives outside their sphere. Even Jasmyn’s one simpatico friend—a schoolteacher with a big Afro who’s married to another Black woman—eventually succumbs to a conservative makeover that seems to rob her of her personality and racial consciousness. And something is decidedly unwholesome about the local Wellness Center. Yet, though Liberty harbors dangerous secrets, Jasmyn’s anxieties stretch beyond it. News of police killings seeps into her consciousness through her phone like poison, and feelings of threat are her constant companion. This puts her at odds with the other Black folks who came to Liberty to forget racial danger. 

The paradoxes and discontents of the upwardly mobile Black bourgeoisie are territory the Jamaican-born, wildly successful Yoon knows intimately and draws with precision. Like Kiley Reid (Such a Fun Age and Come and Get It), Yoon vividly captures the racial and political zeitgeist that haunts the Williams family. The embodiment of striving Black middle-class anxiety, Jasmyn constantly judges herself and others, and is ambivalent even on vacation, feeling guilty “because how is this her life? Why should she have so much when others have so little?” As troubled as she is compelling, Jasmyn is a potent illustration of the effects of racial trauma. 

At times, Jasmyn’s constantly watchful point of view feels painfully earnest. Still, while One of Our Kind lacks the humor of racial satires like Jordan Peele’s Get Out or Percival Everett’s Erasure, Yoon’s observations are bold and razor sharp even when she’s immersed in her characters’ failings.

Wildly successful young adult author Nicola Yoon’s first book for adults vividly captures the paradoxes and discontents of the striving Black middle class.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The Cemetery of Untold Stories

Review by Carole V. Bell

Julia Alvarez’s The Cemetery of Untold Stories is a powerful and lyrical allegory about an older artist haunted by her own creativity.

Alma Cruz is a writer and professor based in Vermont and one of four daughters in a family from the Dominican Republic. Having witnessed a friend and fellow author driven to a mental institution and then to an early death by writerly frustration, Alma is guilt-ridden for resisting her friend’s pleas for help with her unfinished story, and, more than that, determined to avoid the same fate. In the aftermath of her father’s subsequent death, two things become clear. First, Alma herself will “soon be entering that territory of the old—okay, not old old, but the anteroom, no matter what the magazines said about seventy being the new fifty.” And second, aging isn’t just a matter of physical or cognitive decline; “aging also happens in the creative life.” And “there weren’t enough years left to tell all the stories she wanted to tell.”

Seeking change and control, Alma quits her day job. But it’s not enough. The feeling of artistic aging, that she’s running out of time, won’t allow her any peace. The solution, Alma realizes, is to set herself free by exorcising the ghosts of her unfinished projects. Returning to the D.R., she decides to bury her failed manuscripts in the soil of her homeland, but rather than squashing them permanently, the rite gives her characters new life. The stories Alma buries grow like seeds. The remainder of the novel is focused on these tales.

Alvarez has a wonderful way of being both lyrical and precisely concrete at the same time. The specificity of her writing is reflected in myriad ways on every page, and it’s not limited to the beauty of The Cemetery of Untold Stories’ central metaphor about storytelling. Two characters stand out: Papi, Alma’s father, a doctor turned dissident who hated talking about the past, and Bienvenida, a fictionalized version of the wife of Rafael Trujillo, the dictator who ruled the D.R. for 31 years. They have exile in common: “Bienvenida had been erased from history; Papi had sealed himself off . . . these were precisely the characters Alma felt drawn to. The silenced ones, their tongues cut off.” That brutal image is one indelible description among many. Magical and multifaceted, this meditation on creativity, culture and aging is a triumph.

Read our interview with Julia Alvarez on The Cemetery of Untold Stories.

Magical and multifaceted, Julia Alvarez’s meditation on creativity, culture and aging, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, is a triumph.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Julia Alvarez: Writing to the gaps on the bookshelf

Interview by Carole V. Bell

Julia Alvarez’s work is inspired by what she feels is missing in the world: “I write very much to gaps on my bookshelf.” When Alvarez conceived her 1991 debut novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, “the few immigrant stories that were out there like [those] by Oscar Hijuelos, Piri Thomas and Edward Rivera” were all by male authors. That glaring lack spurred the Dominican American author to action. She thought deeply about what the immigrant experience was for women and how to depict it for her characters, even as, having moved from the Dominican Republic to the U.S. when she was 10, she was living a version of that reality herself.

Three decades later, Alvarez’s seventh novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, beautifully illuminates the experience of an artist’s twilight years. Writer Alma Cruz feels worn down by her cherished vocation, like she has “run out of stories and creative stamina.” When she inherits a piece of land in a poor barrio next to a town dump in her homeland of the Dominican Republic, she seizes the opportunity to push what torments her away. She decides to make “a cemetery for all her failed manuscripts, her rough drafts, her never fully realized characters and lay them to rest there.” What happens next is magical. Alma’s characters refuse to be discarded. Alvarez likens the events that ensue to a famous aphorism: “They tried to bury us; they did not know we were seeds.”

Instead of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, why not a portrait of the artist as an older woman?

If writing to fill the gaps on her shelf is how Alvarez makes sense of her work, with this novel, the hole Alvarez is trying to fill is the universal yet neglected topic of growing older yet remaining vital and productive as an artist and human being. As she so perfectly puts it, instead of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, why not a portrait of the artist as an older woman? Intrigued by the evolution involved in aging and what critic Constance Rooke called the Vollendungsroman—“a novel of completion” or “winding up” in contrast to a Bildungsroman— Alvarez uses the supernatural metaphor of a graveyard of stories to bring the issue of aging and art to life on the page. In the abstract, envisioning the creative process as a metaphorical haunting sounds wonderfully fanciful and inventive. From a reader’s experience, the effect is simply genius. Alvarez invites the reader to enter her novel as if they are at the gates of that island cemetery.

The choice to focus on an older artist comes from Alvarez’s soul and experience, but it’s also well-timed. As the large cohort of baby boomers grow older, this phase of life is increasingly salient. Despite the size and influence of the boomer generation, in books, as in much of American culture, the dominant preference for youth remains overwhelming. Alvarez calls out literature’s persistent ageism, which is resistant and slow to change. This bias manifests in a multitude of ways, but Alvarez particularly notes that older characters, especially older women, usually play supporting roles to the protagonist. “When older women do appear as characters, we’re their mothers and their abuelitas,” says Alvarez, a fact that the 73-year-old novelist finds discomfiting and unsatisfactory.

In The Cemetery of Untold Stories, Alvarez turns that marginalization on its head, putting older main character energy on every page. Conjuring a material metaphor of burial for the tangled psychological process of moving on from unfinished business proves a brilliant starting point. And for Alvarez, who began her writing life as a poet, putting ideas into metaphor is a necessary, vital process. “That’s what stories are,” Alvarez says. Her protagonist Alma wants to get beyond the “groomed lawns of once upon a time, she wants to break out of her life as a writer, but what is a life beyond narrative?” What Alma discovers is that “there is no life beyond narrative,” explains Alvarez. In this territory, Alvarez is also inspired by literary critic Edward Said, who wrote about the particular “late style” of older storytellers, which he characterized by a feeling of displacement, running out of time and being preoccupied with things that are unresolved—much in keeping with what Alma and her writer friend go through in The Cemetery of Untold Stories.

Read our starred review of The Cemetery of Untold Stories.

Alvarez has long been a professor of creative writing and literature at Middlebury College (now emeritus, but she’ll teach the occasional workshop for those lucky few students). Her writing is infused with lyricism and metaphor, but it’s also engrossing and accessible. It has the appeal of someone with great respect for the universality of storytelling and the oral tradition. The Dominican American writer is also bilingual, and that too shapes her style and expression. She remembers once being asked at a reading, “When are you going to start writing shorter sentences?” and wondering whether the questioner was right. But Alvarez now knows that what that reader considered flaws are part of what makes her style distinctive. “I’m writing my Spanish in English,” Alvarez says. “The structure is Spanish. The syntax, the floridness of it is the way I hear and understand and construct English. They’re all enmeshed.”

In conversation, Alvarez is an exuberant and fluid communicator of both ideas and process, yet she’s also clear that the transformation of ideas into stories isn’t easy. She likens this beautiful struggle of creation to exploring uncharted territory; there is no road map and no recipe. “When we talk, I have this abstraction, but really, when you’re writing, you’re sort of in the dark, you know, you’re discovering as you go along. You go down the wrong alley, and you have to start over.”

Finding a book that does something new and speaks to your experience is a revelation. Early in Alvarez’s career, these moments were so rare that the pleasure of recognition still resonates today; when she talks about them now it sounds as though she’s experiencing the awakening all over again. “I loved Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior because it was the first book that I read that was by a Chinese American woman, but it could well have been written by a Dominican woman,” says Alvarez. She remembers the first line as one “that I think any Latina of my generation could start her novel with.” The line is “‘You must not tell anyone,’ my mother said, ‘what I am about to tell you’”—then Hong tells the story. Alvarez related because her own mother taught her that family secrets were to be fiercely guarded. Though she respects her family, she has reveled in the freedom of transgressing that taboo throughout her working life.

Alvarez continues to take great pleasure in exposing and exploring life’s great truths in her fiction. Not teaching means more time for travel and for writing from wherever in the world she and her partner land in. As she proves in The Cemetery of Untold Stories, there’s nothing retiring about this phase of life.

Julia Alvarez author photo © Todd Balfour for Middlebury College.

In her enchanting seventh novel, Julia Alvarez explores the perspective of a writer in the late stages of her career.
RomanceContemporary Romance

At First Spite

Review by Carole V. Bell

In Olivia Dade’s witty and warm new romance, At First Spite, the incredibly named town of Harlot’s Bay in coastal Maryland is the perfect place to start over. That’s good because jilted, 37-year-old Athena Greydon has two graduate degrees, no job and nowhere else to go.

Even before her broken engagement to man-child Dr. Johnny Vine, Athena felt irretrievably lost. Now she’s single, broke and living in the 10-foot-wide spite house she purchased for her would-be hubby, right next door to the brother who convinced him that their marriage would be a disaster. Dr. Matthew Vine seems as orderly, stern and starchy as Athena is chaotic. He doubts Athena’s motivations for moving into the spite house, assuming that she must be harboring hopes of reconciliation with Johnny. And Athena, having overheard Matthew’s unflattering comments about her, harbors resentment. They have plenty of reasons to be wary of each other, but Matthew becomes the perfect friend to help Athena climb out of her hole, and the ensuing magnetic connection is a surprise to them both.

It’s a fine setup, but the beauty lies in the execution. As with her Spoiler Alert series, Dade blends angst and humor into a delicious cocktail of romantic and personal possibility. She develops Athena and Matthew’s love story along two compelling tracks. The first is a tropey, funny enemies-to-lovers story, full of banter, barbs and verbal sparring. The second thread follows Matthew’s opening up and Athena’s hard journey to better mental health and acceptance of her depression. Matthew takes care of Athena when she can’t care for herself, resulting in some of the most lovely and realistic scenes involving mental distress in the genre. The pair’s strengths and vulnerabilities beautifully compliment each other, and the only real gap in credulity is how the lovable and brilliant Athena lacks almost any support network from her old life in Virginia.

That said, the depth of community that surrounds the couple is wonderful, as is Harlot Bay’s backstory. According to lore, the town, originally called Ladywright, was founded in the late 17th-century by two women, and became a haven for others. A British governor renamed the town Harlot’s Bay in condemnation of its founders and citizenry, but “the joke was on him because apparently everyone living there liked the change.” Dade sketches the quirky locale and perfectly imperfect people who live there with the loving care of an author who once worked at Colonial Williamsburg.

A slow-burn love story with rich characters, good humor and emotional intelligence, At First Spite is an excellent choice for romance readers craving depth and realism.

A slow-burn love story with rich characters, good humor and emotional intelligence, Olivia Dade’s At First Spite is an excellent choice for romance readers craving depth and realism.
Science Fiction & FantasyFeaturedHorror

Tananarive Due’s ‘The Reformatory’ honors her family ghosts

Interview by Carole V. Bell

Born of a real-world nightmare, Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory is a beautiful and bracing novel that melds historical fiction with speculative elements. Like many masterpieces, it is grounded in a fearsome experience. In late 2012, still reeling from the death of her mother, Due received an unexpected call from the Florida attorney general’s office. They told the acclaimed horror author, screenwriter and scholar that her mother’s uncle, Robert Stephens, had likely been buried on the grounds of the state’s now infamous Dozier School for Boys, a reform school that became a site of grotesque abuse. Researchers and state officials were looking for family members to approve exhumation at the site in order to document what happened.

As Due vividly remembers, “All this came as a shock.” Here was a close relative that she hadn’t even known about, and her family had already seen its share of violent trauma. In fact, she reflects, “When I first got the call, I thought it was in reference to another [boy] on my grandmother’s side who was actually put to death as a juvenile. And that was a family story we had heard about, but I had no idea about Robert Stephens.” 

Getting to the root of what happened to Stephens would require excavating a painful history and risking reviving intergenerational trauma, but it was also a way to honor her mother. Due knew she had to see it through. Within months of that call, Due traveled to the town of Marianna in the Florida Panhandle to witness the moment when her great-uncle’s remains were brought to light.

“It was really almost as if history was trapped at that site.”

Upon arrival, one of the sheriffs on site pointed her down the road and told her to “follow the mudhole. I was like, what mudhole?” For Due, who was born in Tallahassee and was raised in Miami, with its distinctly urban and Latin American flavor, “this small Panhandle town was a whole new world.”

“The whole experience was so immersive,” Due says. “It was really almost as if history was trapped at that site.” While in Marianna, Due attended a meeting of Dozier survivors. A man recounted “a beating so severe that the poor child couldn’t see his parents on visiting day because his clothes had actually been whipped into the skin of his back.” 

What Due witnessed in the swampy Florida heat transformed a strange obligation into a visceral and deeply felt mission, and cemented her desire to write about the boys at Dozier. She “couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be a child at this hell house.”

Book jacket image for The Reformatory by Tananarive Due

Finding the right genre and narrative for a subject this brutal, though, was a challenge. Though the former journalist had written a memoir with her mother, Civil Rights advocate Patricia Stephens Due (Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights), excellent memoirs had already been published by survivors, and Due felt too removed from the events to take a nonfiction angle on the subject. Ultimately, what Due really wanted to do was give Robert a better story than he had experienced in his short life. To do that, she needed to write a novel.

Due cares deeply about the social history she’s bringing to life, and sought to make dark realities accessible to readers. But she is also cognizant of the dangers of that quest and was loath to create anything that could be exploitative. This, Due is clear, is one of the greatest hurdles with this kind of material: “When we’re writing about difficult times in history, the line between trauma porn and honoring the past can be very thin.” That said, ignoring the violence that took place in real life was not an option. “I felt I had no choice but to have my protagonist experience at least a taste of what those survivors had talked about.” 

Getting it all right felt urgent to Due, but also posed a perilously high degree of difficulty, the literary equivalent of performing a triple axle. In a testament to her skill, The Reformatory deftly delivers on all of its author’s aims. 

Though it springs from the same grim institutional history as Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys, Due’s supernatural period thriller is riveting and highly original. Set in the 1950s, the novel centers a fictionalized version of Robert Stephens, a 12-year-old African American boy living in Florida whose life is changed when he tries to rescue his sister, Gloria, from being harassed by a wealthy white teenager. Thanks to the attacker’s powerful father, Robert is quickly arrested, convicted and sentenced to six months at the Dozier-esque Gracetown School for Boys. His stint at the cruel institution, euphemistically known as “the Reformatory,” comes 30 years after a fire that killed 25 boys, many of whom were buried on the grounds along with the bodies of other inmates. The ghosts of these dead boys haunt the school and Robert becomes their emissary, communicating with them and acting as an intermediary between the corrupt warden and the spirits seeking both revenge and release.

Before ‘The Reformatory,’ the longest Due had spent on a single work was two years. This one took seven.

This spectral element unlocked something crucial for Due: “The ghosts can represent the violence without me having to basically write a book that is just about beating after beating after beating, murder after murder after murder.” That blending of genres, history and the fantastical, struck an important balance, enabling her to tell hard truths without inflicting maximum trauma on herself or her readers. 

Weaving history and the speculative is one of Due’s talents as a writer, but that particular mixture also has an established literary tradition as seen in works by other Black authors, such as Beloved by Toni Morrison. The rich history of how the African American experience has found expression in horror is a story Due has long worked to tell, both as executive producer on Horror Noire, a documentary on the history of Black horror, and through her groundbreaking college courses on the Black horror aesthetic. While the creative path that emerged felt like a fit to the veteran horror writer, it was still rocky. Threading the needle between truth and exploitation required skill and more time than she had ever devoted to a project. Before The Reformatory, the longest Due had spent on a single work was two years. This one took seven. 

For part of that time, Due was immersed in and, she admits, “hiding behind” the research process. In 2018, she published a short story also titled “The Reformatory” in the Boston Review that tackled the most difficult scene from her work in progress. Then came COVID-19 and a jolting sense of her own mortality.

Read our starred review of ‘The Reformatory’ by Tananarive Due.

“It was COVID that really kicked me in the pants and made me realize on a deep visceral level that I could die without finishing the book,” Due says. The memory of that time is still vivid. “This was before the vaccine. This was when we didn’t know what was going on. So it was during that time that I put myself on a very strict page quota and I kept a chart up on my wall.” The placement was meaningful. “There was a day I didn’t write, and all those zeros were right in my face. That was the kind of discipline it took to finally finish the book. It was a real push.”

That life-altering visit to Marianna was a perfect matching of subject, artist and moment: The result is a genre-crossing masterwork. Ten years after it was begun, The Reformatory has come to fruition.

Photo of Tananarive Due by Melissa Herbert.

In her masterful horror novel, Due fictionalizes her great uncle’s experiences at the notorious Dozier School for Boys—the same institution that inspired Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys.
FictionLiterary FictionComing of Age

The Happy Couple

Review by Carole V. Bell

In Naoise Dolan’s addictive, rubbernecking disaster story about love, engaged 20-something Dubliners wrestle with intimacy and commitment as their wedding day approaches.

Oxford-educated Luke’s most striking characteristic is his obvious ambivalence. His fiancée Celine’s most singular trait, apart from being a dedicated, almost single-minded, internationally recognized concert pianist, is her willful denial in the face of Luke’s transgressions. Even Luke marvels that she puts up with him: “​​You’d think Celine would have seen my early diffidence as a warning. Whatever about the unanswered texts, me literally saying ‘I don’t want a relationship’ is, perhaps, a red flag. But Celine has never met sheet music she couldn’t crack.”

This dynamic is maddening at first. But, like reality television, relational trainwrecks are compelling. The first sign of trouble is that Luke and Celine’s engagement begins, excruciatingly, with what feels like a shrug rather than a decision. Discussing their hypothetical relationship limits, Luke confesses, “if I thought we’d never get married. Or that level of commitment. If I knew that wasn’t going to happen, then . . . .” When Celine attempts to offer reassurance by suggesting that she “probably” wants to be with him forever, as if staring down a dare, Luke asks the question.

Though The Happy Couple will inevitably be compared to Sally Rooney’s Normal People, its wry voice and cleverly executed Rashomon-like structure, revisiting pivotal events and foundational cracks in Celine and Luke’s relationship from their perspectives as well as those of their closest friends and family, make it a standout. Bit by bit, in lean, ironic prose that packs powerful insight, Dolan reveals the humanity and vulnerability of all parties involved, including brilliant sections from the perspectives of Luke’s best man and former boyfriend Archie, and Celine’s sister Phoebe.

We don’t see what Luke is thinking for a long time, and he’s easy to hate when he’s merely reflected in other people’s emotional wreckage. When, after 100 pages, he finally comes into focus, his sensitivity and depth of feeling are shocking. The closer we look, the more human these characters become, and the more it hurts to see Celine and Luke stumble away from each other. Dolan’s challenging and well-crafted rewriting of the marriage plot has much to reveal about love and perspective.

Naoise Dolan reveals the humanity and vulnerability of all her characters through a cleverly executed multiperspectival structure that makes The Happy Couple a standout.
Science Fiction & FantasyHorror

The Reformatory

Review by Carole V. Bell

The Reformatory is a fantastical, elegant and miraculous delivery of justice for historic atrocities by master of horror Tananarive Due. The NAACP Image-award winner reimagines the deadly abuse that took place at Florida’s Dozier School for Boys—including the tragic experience of the author’s own relative, Robert Stephens, who died in 1937 at the institution—as a 1950s-era tale of ghosts and redemption. 

From the start, Due reminds us of the humanity of these children. Twelve-year-old Robert “Robbie” Stephens Jr. lives a hard life marked by striving and discipline, watched over by his 16-year-old sister, Gloria. Their mother is dead and their father, a would-be union organizer, fled to Chicago to find work and escape the Ku Klux Klan. The money he sends home never lasts long. Still, Robert retains his child’s sense of wonder and sweetness, as well as nascent otherworldly abilities he strains to use to connect with his mother. And despite Gloria’s emphasis on discipline, she takes thoughtful care of her brother, trapping wild game after church as a treat or adding smoked pork from a neighbor to their greens “so he could remember the taste of something other than cornmeal and soup.” 

With ‘The Reformatory,’ Tananarive Due honors her family ghosts.

Due excels in both style and storytelling, her sentences singing with specificity and creativity. The conflict that changes Robert and Gloria’s lives is simple and fleeting, but Due’s finely honed choreography makes the precise, exacting nature of Jim Crow racial etiquette visible. Here as in every other page of The Reformatory, historical context emerges organically, interwoven through story and character. When white teenager Lyle McCormack’s leering gaze—and overbearing, insistent physical presence—fixes on Gloria as they walk home, Robbie recalls one of the rules his father taught him. “He was never, ever to wink his eye at a white girl or white woman. Foolishness like that can get you killed.” Even though he doesn’t yet fully understand the sexual undertones and dangers implied in his father’s warnings, it makes Robbie see red that the rule doesn’t go both ways. Instinct overrules home training, and in a violation of racial codes several layers deep, “Robert ran toward Lyle McCormack, swinging his foot at the bigger boy’s left knee.”

Due captures every nuance and every horrible, deadly implication of these moments with surgical precision. Red McCormack, Lyle’s infamously vindictive and racist father, sees what happens, and Robbie is soon sent to the reformatory. And Robbie and Gloria’s threatening encounter with Lyle seems bucolic when compared to subsequent ones at the school, a site of institutional cruelty where the souls of Black boys snuffed out too early yearn for family and freedom. There, his ability to see ghosts puts Robbie in an awkward but powerful position. His second sight not only becomes a window to the truth of what happens at the reformatory and what happened to the boys who went missing there, but it also may offer the possibility of salvation.

Due’s humane and meticulously researched retelling reminds us that nothing is scarier than the demons that walk among us. Beautiful and expertly executed, The Reformatory is a horror masterpiece that derives its power from both the magical and the mundane.

Beautiful and expertly executed, The Reformatory is a horror masterpiece that derives its power from both the magical and the mundane.
RomanceContemporary Romance

Sorry, Bro

Review by Carole V. Bell

Nareh “Nar” Bedrossian, the fascinating and lovable protagonist of Taleen Voskuni’s tender sapphic rom-com, Sorry, Bro, is a walking, talking identity crisis. Nar’s never been comfortable in her own skin; she doesn’t fully embrace her career as a video journalist, her Armenian heritage or her bisexuality. There’s plenty of room for growth, and Voskuni deftly delivers it in a romance bursting with specificity and cultural depth, told through Nar’s distinctive voice.

Voskuni kicks things off with Nar’s boyfriend’s complete failure of a marriage proposal, and this cringey and brilliant opening scene exposes what Nar knows in her soul: She’ll never be happy if she surrenders part of herself for a man who is so dismissive of her culture. That’s why Nar agrees to attend “Explore Armenia,” a monthlong series of events that celebrate the Armenian American community in her home of San Francisco, California. Who knows? Maybe she’ll meet a man her mother deems appropriate (read: handsome, eligible and Armenian). Instead, Nar meets beautiful, chic and confident Erebuni Minassian, who rescues Nar from having to marshal the confidence to enter a mixer on her own.

Despite the value Nar places on community and family connection, she frequently recoils from what she perceives to be embarrassing aspects of Armenian identity, such as their penchant for gold, departures from Western beauty ideals and ubiquitous discussions of the 1915 Armenian genocide. This discomfort is a result of the clash of values that marked Nar’s childhood. Her late father strove to be a more stereotypically white American, while her mother takes pride in their culture.

A nuanced, complex battle between these two sets of priorities is constantly raging inside Nar’s head. Cool, levelheaded Erebuni is a totally swoonworthy love interest, and it’s impossible not to root for Nar. Voskuni gorgeously depicts their connection, but the narrative arc hinges on Nar’s journey from ambivalence to acceptance. Sorry, Bro is a beautifully crafted portrait of a woman and the Armenian American community, which has been historically underrepresented on the page.

Taleen Voskuni’s sapphic rom-com, Sorry, Bro, is a beautifully crafted portrait of a woman and her Armenian American community.
RomanceHistorical Romance

The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen

Review by Carole V. Bell

KJ Charles’ latest historical romance, The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen, is best described as a queer version of “Poldark.” It’s an adventurous cross-class love story set in the marshy hinterlands of England’s County Kent, as the Napoleonic Wars rage in the background. 

The action-packed and intrigue-filled plot begins with a union of virtual opposites. Gareth Inglis, a gently bred law clerk, and Joss Doomsday, a charismatic country smuggler, have little in common. But for one blissful week, they are just “Kent” and “London,” aliases signifying their respective home turfs.Their idyllic affair abruptly ends when Joss is called back home to attend to urgent family business and Gareth, who’s experienced more than his share of rejection, assumes this “family business” is just a polite brushoff. 

That would have been the end, if not for one inconvenient fact: London-raised Gareth actually hails from Romney Marsh, the same patch of Kentish land as his working-class ex-lover. And when his estranged father dies, Gareth inherits his title, country home and responsibilities. 

Just like that, Joss and Gareth’s no-strings tryst turns complicated as they find themselves not only in close proximity but also on opposite sides of the law. Joss is in charge of his family’s illegal but well-established and locally respected smuggling operation. And Gareth, now an influential local landowner by virtue of his inheritance, has a half-sister who is romantically attached to a zealous revenue officer, enemy number one in Romney Marsh, where even judges and gentry buy their goods from Joss’ family. 

The various financial and internecine quarrels are convincingly rendered and the supporting characters and setting finely textured, but it’s the tenderness and steam that emanate from Gareth and Joss that really give the story its spark. Their relationship is deeply passionate, and they have a lovely way of communicating even when they don’t have the language to articulate their feelings. Charles beautifully describes exactly what each man is going through emotionally, even when no words are exchanged: “They kissed their way past the hurt and the loneliness, kissed themselves back together . . .”

Fans of Charles’ Society of Gentlemen series and new readers alike will adore this complex and emotional historical romance.

Fans of author KJ Charles’ Society of Gentlemen series and new readers alike will adore The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen, her complex and emotional historical romance.
RomanceContemporary Romance

Cover reveal: ‘The Kingmaker’ by Kennedy Ryan

Feature by Carole V. Bell

BookPage is excited to host a first look at the new print edition of Kennedy Ryan’s gorgeous and pulse-quickening romance The Kingmaker. 

The first part of an addictive duology, The Kingmaker is a suspenseful, intrigue-filled ride that generated internet buzz before BookTok and Bookstagram ruled the bestseller lists. The beautiful new edition from Bloom will allow even more readers to discover what makes this star-crossed love story so unforgettable.

The titular kingmaker, Lennix Hunter, is a powerful political advocate for Native American people. Maxim Cade is both an environmental scientist and capitalist crusader; he wants to “save the world and make lots of money.” Lennix and Maxim meet at an oil pipeline protest and, despite their stark differences, find that their values are mostly in sync. It’s just the timing they can’t seem to make work as their high-powered careers, their politics and Maxim’s family create seemingly insurmountable barriers. Lennix and Max’s epic love story spans two decades, four continents and two books, but it always feels intimate due to Ryan’s lyrical and sexy prose.

The new edition of The Kingmaker will be available on shelves at libraries and bookstores everywhere on May 23, 2023. In the meantime, we’re thrilled to reveal its beautiful cover, which was designed by Stephanie Gafron at Sourcebooks. And read on for a Q&A with Kennedy Ryan!

Tell me about The Kingmaker. How did you first conceive of this story?
Activism is a common theme in a lot of my books. I saw footage of a pipeline protest, and it stirred my outrage but also my imagination. I started envisioning two best friends, one Indigenous and one Black, who start a political consulting firm to elect leaders who will champion their causes. The Kingmaker is the story of Lennix, who is Yavapi-Apache, and Maxim, who is the heir to an oil empire.

You’ve explored sports and entertainment in other books, but the All the King’s Men series examines the intersection of politics and business. What was appealing about that context for you?
I wanted to write about people of deep conviction who dedicate their lives to making the world a better place. Lennix and Maxim start out as idealists, and over the course of their lives, over the course of the story, they become more jaded, but they never lose their fire for making a difference. Maxim is an environmentalist who focuses on sustainable products, which makes him a billionaire. He’s the only billionaire I’ve ever written, and I had to have him sign the Giving Pledge to justify it to myself, LOL. I enjoyed playing with how these dreamers become more pragmatic over time while trying to hold onto what initially drove them. And I wanted to examine what would happen when people who are this passionate for their causes turn that passion on each other.

While creating this suspenseful series and its hard-charging, powerful heroine, where did you turn for inspiration?
I definitely was inspired by Olivia Pope from “Scandal”: a strong woman of color who has conviction and works toward the greater good (even if her white hat does get a little sullied in later seasons!).

I’m not Indigenous, so I had to really interrogate if this was a story I should tell. And if I did tell it, was I prepared to meet my own standard for writing outside your lived ethnic experience? It’s a high bar. It should be a high bar. I interviewed several Indigenous women, making sure some of them were from the same tribe as my heroine. During some of those conversations, the ladies recommended books I should read, which enriched our conversations and deepened my understanding of what I was writing. There was an aspect of the story that I consulted a medicine man for, in addition to the sensitivity readers I compensated, to ensure there would be no harmful representation. We took our time to get it as right as we could. They all inspired me, educated me, guided me. I’m so incredibly grateful and proud of the story that came out of that process. And when it was all said and done, I made sure to amplify #ownvoices writers of Indigenous romance. 

How have things changed since you wrote The Kingmaker? Is there any issue or situation in the novel that you might handle differently today?
Throughout the story, Lennix is fighting for legislation addressing Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. Almost every woman I interviewed brought up this subject because it’s such a prevalent and complex problem, and at the time, there were no laws to help. Since the book was published, there has been some legislation passed. We still have a long way to go, though, to ensure Indigenous women’s safety is taken seriously.

For readers who know you mainly from Instagram and BookTok, what are the similarities between the All The King’s Men series and books like Reel and Before I Let Go?
It’s all women of color, mostly Black women. They are often powerful, yet also vulnerable. I usually build the woman’s character first and then determine what kind of man she needs. I always joke that whether he’s an alpha male or has golden retriever energy, all my heroes are feminists, meaning they believe in the fundamental equality between women and men in all things. They will adore her, respect her and acknowledge her full agency.

I don’t really write escapism. It’s romance and it’s a guaranteed happily ever after, but I don’t necessarily want to provide readers passage away from the real world. I want them to think about it deeply. Feel about it deeply. Encounter characters who are navigating the same challenges as many of them. Chronic illness, social injustice, domestic abuse, family dysfunction, mental health—whatever it is, it’s an opportunity to show strength and love. It’s an opportunity to inspire hope.

You are one of only two competitive RWA RITA Award-winning Black writers, and you’ve had success in both traditional publishing and self-publishing. You could go to any imprint you wanted for this reissue (or release it on your own). What was special about Bloom?
I see Bloom thinking outside the box in ways that can really work for indie authors. They have the infrastructure and resources of a traditional publisher, but they are a lot more agile and flexible than many in the industry. They aren’t afraid to try new things or to take risks.

What was appealing to me, too, especially for this story, was that they understood where it came from: a place of uncompromising honesty about colonization, about racism, about the history of this country. None of that scares me, and it doesn’t scare them either.

I hear from a lot of people that I’m not “romance” enough, that I’m too close to women’s fiction. And the WF crowd sometimes thinks my books are too spicy. In a lot of ways, my stories don’t look like anything else in the romance space. Bloom’s really embraced that. I’m really fortunate to have a lot of choice at this stage of my career, and if I choose to work with someone, it’s because I believe I have something that benefits them and they have something that benefits me. I’m excited to see how this story finds a new wave of readers and wider visibility with Bloom behind it.

Did you have a hand in the look and feel of the cover?
Some, yes! It was a collaborative effort with lots of meetings and mock-ups. We wanted an aesthetic that appealed to both readers looking for romance and those looking for romance and more, which is definitely what The Kingmaker is.

What else can Kennedy Ryan fans look forward to in the coming months?
A lot! The Rebel King, which is book two of the All the King’s Men series, will rerelease right after The Kingmaker. Bloom is also rereleasing Hoops, my most popular series, this October. This summer, I’ll release the next book in my Hollywood Renaissance series, Score, which is the follow-up to Reel. Different couple, same universe. And you never know what else I have up my sleeve! 🙂

We’re delighted to reveal the stunning new cover for Kennedy Ryan’s The Kingmaker, which will be rereleased by Bloom this May.
Mystery & SuspenseMysteryHistorical Mystery

A Tempest at Sea

Review by Carole V. Bell

In A Tempest at Sea, a twisty and turbulent installment of Sherry Thomas’ perennially entertaining Lady Sherlock mystery series, a glamorous Christie-esque cast sails into danger on the open seas.

A Tempest at Sea is the seventh adventure of Charlotte Holmes, a brilliant detective who solves mysteries while pretending to be the assistant of her brother, Sherlock, who in Thomas’ series does not exist and is merely the front for Charlotte’s exploits. The sleuth has recently faked her death in order to hide from Moriarty, a criminal mastermind whom Charlotte has tangled with in prior books. But now British spymaster Lord Remington has offered her a chance to return to her former life with his protection if she can find a missing dossier. The documents are soon to leave the country on the RMS Provence, protected by Moriarty’s minions. Charlotte disguises herself as a wealthy dowager and boards the ship, but then things get even more complicated. Two days into the voyage, one of the most notable passengers, a volatile self-made millionaire with a shady past, is shot dead. Charlotte and her beau, Lord Ingram, must get to the bottom of what happened, in addition to finding the dossier and protecting Charlotte’s secrets.

Thomas’ confidence and ease at the helm of the series is obvious, and she’s clearly having fun playing with the tropes and stock characters of the historical mystery subgenre. A Tempest at Sea recalls treasured Agatha Christie novels like Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express, which feature a divergent group of personalities assembled for a luxury voyage that soon turns deadly. The Provence is a state-of-the-art, first-class-only steamer vessel spiriting old money and new to a host of disparate destinations, and the mystery makes the most of this setting. It’s the ultimate locked-door location—days from land, in international waters—and unlike the equally popular country house setting, there’s no escape, no reprieve and few hiding places.

There are rumblings of trouble among the passengers even before their departure, with entitled, resentful old money bumping up against the nouveau riche (both literally and figuratively). Everyone seems to harbor a secret agenda, and Thomas excels at developing these characters, especially their petty biases. Charlotte’s mother shows up and proceeds to act out against those of lesser station, and an aristocratic passenger loudly embarasses the sister of the eventual murder victim. Even in these minor skirmishes, the danger is palpable.

Though it’s not all smooth sailing—there are occasional gaps in logic, even if the charm of the characters, settings and twists outweighs them—it’s a joy to see the well-oiled Holmes team spring into action and to watch Ingram and Charlotte’s romantic relationship thrive.

It’s a joy to see Charlotte Holmes spring into action (and to watch her romantic relationship thrive) in Sherry Thomas’ A Tempest at Sea.

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