The Other Black Girl - by Zakiya Dalila Harris

This book had lots of potential, but got caught up with a lot of inner dialogue. This book read like it was a lot of ideas and background that an actor writes out to prepare for a role. It moves exceedingly sloooowly. It needed to be edited. It felt like it would have been a great short story and someone said add a hundred pages or so and it could be a novel. They changed a few things for the Hulu series, which made it flow better. The subject matter was thought provoking, but the story itself needed work. I wonder if there was a ghostwriter for this book, there was jargon that did not feel authentic to the women she was writing about, maybe to many other opinions were added to the book. I wouldn’t read it again, but I don’t think it was a terrible book. It’s more Stepford Wives (the old TV movie) than get out. It made me re-read the Age of Innocence just to make sure it wasn’t just a lengthy book that made me sleepy.

Suspense? No Thriller? No Fiction? Yes It took me over 3 months to finish this book! It was excruciatingly slow and overwritten. There was nothing really happening for a lot of this book. The looooong inner dialogue and all the multiple voices/POV were distracting from the story. It jumped back and forth from the 80s to present day between chapters; It was all just really hard to follow. The author was trying to tie these stories and experiences together and it was not working for me. I wish I had a character guide with pictures or something to help me keep up. I dreaded when a chapter would end because it usually jumped to another time period involving other characters and I didn’t know wtf was going on. To be honest, this might be better as a movie or limited series because it did not transcend onto the pages. A lot of the action was happening off page in this book and that was really a mistake. Also, the whole plot wrapped up in the last 30 or so pages. So for the previous 300 pages, it was giving absolutely nothing. Boy was the ending UNSATISFACTORY and incomplete. Furthermore, I understand that this was a fiction and probably a satire but it was problematic. I don’t like what it perpetuates and it’s not for black women. IYKYK. If you make it half way through this book and get bored, you can just skip to the end. There really needs to be a sequel to this but I probably wouldn’t bother reading it. I don’t want to waste another 3 months.

This book had a lot of potential. I felt like everything happened in the last 3 chapters of the book. Unexpected ending for as well.

Fascinating read! Compelling and thoughtful with a twist.