The Other Black Girl — Zakiya Dalila Harris | Review
The “Couldn’t put this down even for a sip of water” Award for June goes to: The Other Black Girl, by Zakiya Dalila Harris.
This medium-paced thriller in three acts has the perfect suspense arc from start to finish — it never lets up. The mystery and the terror are exceptionally well-balanced.
I don’t want to spoil too much, so here’s an abridged version of the blurb:
“Twenty-six-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers is tired of being the only Black employee at Wagner Books. Fed up with the isolation and the micro-aggressions, she's thrilled when Hazel starts working in the cubicle beside hers. They've only just started comparing natural haircare regimens, though, when […] the notes begin to appear on Nella's desk: LEAVE WAGNER. NOW.”
Nella is a great protagonist: we’re let in on her emotional inner world while also understanding the spaces — and people — around her. In her quest to uncover this mystery, her anxiety and worry (bordering on paranoia) come through so clearly on the page. As a reader, I rooted for her, feared for her, and most importantly I felt her anger even when she swallows it down for the sake of others.
We also get the perspectives of other characters through first-person narration, flashbacks interwoven with Nella’s perspective: to draw out secrets that Nella mustn’t know about yet, and to both shed more light on the conspiracy while making it loom ever larger, more sinister. The reader is dropped into those secondary perspectives without preamble, which creates more immediacy on fewer pages. Often there isn’t a whole lot, if any, of exposition when the reader is shifted to another perspective, but it’s never jarring — if anything, it’s exciting. Harris lets us figure things out on our own, and the plot is so well sign-posted that it all locks together. It’s predictable in a good way without being banal. The story invites the reader to anticipate the next twist, the next betrayal.
The writing is fluid and flexible; the dialogue flows naturally and descriptions of people and places are deft and vivid. The red thread of dread that winds itself through the whole story is what drives you to read on — I couldn’t put it down all day.
As a thriller, The Other Black Girl is genre-savvy and precise, slowly turning up the heat without relying on shock value. The evil plot is bizarre, but that’s why it’s satire: and to be honest, life is stranger than fiction. The ending is a gut-punch but it makes sense. The struggle against institutional (as well as everyday) racism and inequality will never be won with one grand triumph. It’s getting up, day after day, to keep fighting.
And the real enemy, this much is clear, is not the other Black girl. That’s the devil talking.
Zakiya Harris wrote this novel while working at a publishing house for several years, according to the jacket, and there’s really only details of the villainous plot that are satirical. White authors’ white tears when confronted with their own shortcomings in writing Black characters certainly are not. The microaggressions, the gatekeeping bullshit, the white guilt and fragility used to keep Nella apologising, to gaslight her… that is publishing world reality.
Highly, highly recommend for anyone to pick this up!
