![]() 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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