Colored Television (a GMA Book Club Pick)
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Book Overview
A NATIONAL BESTSELLER A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK A WASHINGTON POST TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2024
"A laugh-out-loud cultural comedy... This is the New Great American Novel, and Danzy Senna has set the standard." -LA Times
"Funny, foxy and fleet...The jokes are good, the punches land, the dialogue is tart." -Dwight Garner, The New York Times A brilliant take on love and ambition, failure and reinvention, and the racial-identity-industrial complex from the bestselling author of Caucasia Jane has high hopes that her life is about to turn around. After a long, precarious stretch bouncing among sketchy rentals and sublets, she and her family are living in luxury for a year, house-sitting in the hills above Los Angeles. The gig magically coincides with Jane's sabbatical, giving her the time and space she needs to finish her second novel--a centuries-spanning epic her artist husband, Lenny, dubs her "mulatto War and Peace." Finally, some semblance of stability and success seems to be within her grasp. But things don't work out quite as hoped. Desperate for a plan B, like countless writers before her Jane turns her gaze to Hollywood. When she finagles a meeting with Hampton Ford, a hot producer with a major development deal at a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a "real writer," and together they begin to develop "the Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies." Things finally seem to be going right for Jane--until they go terribly wrong. Funny, piercing, and page turning, Colored Television is Senna's most on-the-pulse, ambitious, and rewarding novel yet.
"A laugh-out-loud cultural comedy... This is the New Great American Novel, and Danzy Senna has set the standard." -LA Times
"Funny, foxy and fleet...The jokes are good, the punches land, the dialogue is tart." -Dwight Garner, The New York Times A brilliant take on love and ambition, failure and reinvention, and the racial-identity-industrial complex from the bestselling author of Caucasia Jane has high hopes that her life is about to turn around. After a long, precarious stretch bouncing among sketchy rentals and sublets, she and her family are living in luxury for a year, house-sitting in the hills above Los Angeles. The gig magically coincides with Jane's sabbatical, giving her the time and space she needs to finish her second novel--a centuries-spanning epic her artist husband, Lenny, dubs her "mulatto War and Peace." Finally, some semblance of stability and success seems to be within her grasp. But things don't work out quite as hoped. Desperate for a plan B, like countless writers before her Jane turns her gaze to Hollywood. When she finagles a meeting with Hampton Ford, a hot producer with a major development deal at a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a "real writer," and together they begin to develop "the Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies." Things finally seem to be going right for Jane--until they go terribly wrong. Funny, piercing, and page turning, Colored Television is Senna's most on-the-pulse, ambitious, and rewarding novel yet.
Format:Hardcover
Language:English
ISBN:0593544374
ISBN13:9780593544372
Release Date:September 2024
Publisher:Riverhead Books
Length:288 Pages
Weight:1.08 lbs.
Dimensions:1.0" x 6.3" x 9.3"
Customer Reviews
1 rating
Another Step Backward for Black Culture
Published by StarraReads , 2 months ago
Any time someone takes front stage to illuminate an underrepresented group (in this case mixed race Blacks) I hope and pray that it’s handled with deep consideration and care.
Nope. Disappointingly, this author continues with tropes that mixed race Blacks are conflicted, wayward, coveting, unscrupulous, vapid, etc. Even goes so far to refer to the vast and varying collective as “mulattos” - and she means it.
Super sad how fiction writers (and apparently instructors) have trended towards passing their real lives off as “fiction” by altering a few details here and there. Whatever happened to the craft of building new ideas, new characters, new worlds? Instead we get a thinly veiled re-telling of a not-so-interesting vaguely bi-racial woman’s entanglement with Kenya Barris.
Add to that the out dated ideas of: Black women “hot combing” their hair to look presentable and the inaccurate nods to Black culture “Can We Talk” by Tevin Campbell was released in the NINETIES. The narrator’s tendency to give every character the same accent didn’t help either. I suffered through this one. So detached and singular- should have been a memoir.
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