Assembly

Starred review from June 7, 2021
Brown’s provocative and lyrical debut follows a young Black British woman’s navigation of the racism and sexism at her investment banking job while she contends with a breast cancer diagnosis. Brown opens with three third-person vignettes describing an unnamed woman’s sexual harassment from a man she works with, who calls her hair “wild” and her skin “exotic,” then shifts to a first-person account from an unnamed woman, possibly the same one, of why she chose to work for banks. “I understood what they were. Ruthless, efficient money-machines with a byproduct of social mobility.” Her “Lean In feminist” work friend thinks the narrator’s white boyfriend will propose during an upcoming visit to his parents’ estate, but the narrator can tell her would-be mother-in-law hopes it’s a passing fling. Before the trip, she gets the results of a biopsy and tells her boyfriend there’s nothing to worry about. She also reflects ominously on the doctor’s admonishment on her resistance to getting surgery (“that’s suicide”), and on the notion that a successful Black person can ever “transcend” race. References to bell hooks’s writing on decolonization and Claudia Rankine’s concept of “historical selves” bolster her fierce insights. This is a stunning achievement of compressed narrative and fearless articulation.

Starred review from December 3, 2021

DEBUT Brown's first novel is essentially an interior monologue delivered by a woman preparing to attend a sumptuous event at the estate of her boyfriend's patrician parents in the English countryside. The narrator is a Black British woman of Jamaican descent and, like her parents, born in the UK. Her career in finance is a mark of achievement she thinks might also be a sign of complicity with the status quo, as represented by the white family she is visiting and their friends, rooted beneficiaries of imperialism she comments on bitterly, for whom she must role play politesse as they look expectantly for the hidden rage and envy that will affirm them, just as she must role play with the white colleagues who think she got her promotion because she's Black, conservatives who smugly say she's what the country is all about, and liberals who complain that she's selling out her community. All this and a boyfriend who thinks they talk honestly and a serious medical issue to wrestle with, too--all issues she ponders here. VERDICT As much portraiture and piercing social commentary as it is narrative, this affecting work is like no novel you have ever read. For all readers wanting to deepen their understanding of identity issues and/or the formal possibilities of fiction.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 1, 2021
A young Black woman considers her options. At the center of this brilliant debut is a young Black British woman who works in finance. She works, and for as long as she can remember she has worked, in relentless pursuit of achievement, success, excellence. "I am everything they told me to become," she says. Her White boyfriend comes from a moneyed old family, and an invitation to his parents' anniversary party--a gargantuan affair--frames one end of this slim, swiftly moving novel. On the other end is a visit the narrator pays to her oncologist, where she discovers she has a decision to make. Between the oncologist and the party is an intense rumination on her choices, her life, and the pieces from which she's managed to assemble an identity, however flawed. "I have emotions," she says. "But I try to consider events as if they're happening to someone else. Some other entity." Indeed, the narrator seems painfully distant from both the people around her and the changes taking place in her life. She is constantly aware of how her appearance is utilized by others--part of her job, for instance, involves giving talks on diversity, for which her very presence is considered proof of her company's success. In just over a hundred pages, Brown tackles not only race, but class, wealth, and gender disparities, the lingering effects of colonialism, and the limits of language ("How can I use such a language to examine the society it reinforces?" the narrator wonders). This is Brown's first novel, and it has all the jagged clarity of a shard of broken glass. A piercing meditation on identity and race in contemporary Britain.

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July 1, 2021
To be Black and to court assimilation may promise survival, but does it also involve complicity? Debut novelist Brown's nameless heroine, a third-generation Jamaican immigrant in Britain, seems to have it all: a prestigious though demanding career in finance, an upper-class white boyfriend, and all the trappings of twenty-first-century success. Yet she is surrounded by white colleagues who constantly question her competence and her right to be there, who assume she will handle low-level clerical tasks they can't be bothered with, who parade their "fresh mediocrity, assumptions, and entitlement." Tokenized both at work and in her relationship ("His presence vouches for mine, assures them that I'm the right sort of diversity. In turn, I offer him a certain liberal credibility"), she begins to wonder whether her continued existence is not acquiescence, since, "Surviving makes me a participant in their narrative." With stylistic economy, Brown etches a portrait of contemporary Britain in all its racial hypocrisy and contradictions, and of a stubbornly brilliant woman for whom death becomes the ultimate protest.

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