There’s a loneliness in being the only one; it resonates throughout Zakiya Dalila Harris’s imaginative and audacious debut novel. The heroine is Nella Rogers, an ambitious black editorial assistant at Wagner Books, a prestigious American publishing house where white Ivy League graduates with trust funds take on low-wage editorial salaries in order to ascend the corporate ladder. When Nella joins, it’s been well over two decades since Wagner’s brilliant but scandal-engulfed black editor fled New York City, desperately scratching her itching scalp – a cleverly placed hint of the way Harris’s novel will use the importance of hair products in the lives of black women to startling effect.
Nella represents
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