![]() Mickey, a striver with dreams to make it big, is crushed. Nina, Mickey’s mercurial white boss, has been trying to hire Chelsea’s friend, another Black writer, to replace her. At an industry event, she is pulled aside in a moment of perfunctory solidarity from Chelsea, one of the few other Black women at the company, who delivers bad news: Mickey’s job is in jeopardy. Mickey Hayward is a writer at Wave, a Manhattan-based magazine for young women that was recently acquired by a digital media conglomerate. The novel opens on a well-calibrated set piece of suspense and disquiet. ![]() “Homebodies” is the story of a young Black woman’s quarter-life crisis as she wonders what her place in the world will be. It is this eye for the rhythms and textures of life - of millennial digital media, of the death by a thousand cuts offered by workplace racism, of Maryland suburbia - that makes this novel vivid and inviting. ![]() The impatient lunch-break Slack ping from a peevish white boss perfectly sets up the doom of the meeting that follows. Fashion girls are “Midwest Christian-types born-again in fuzzy pink cardigans and Dries boots.” A girlfriend’s painstaking domestic labors are described with equal parts unease and grateful relief. ![]() In her sharp, charming and passionate debut, “Homebodies,” Tembe Denton-Hurst showcases an eye for the details that matter. ![]()
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