HOMEBODIES, by Tembe Denton-Hurst

In her sharp, charming and passionate debut, “Homebodies,” Tembe Denton-Hurst showcases a watch for the main points that matter. Trend women are “Midwest Christian-types born-again in fuzzy pink cardigans and Dries boots.” A girlfriend’s painstaking home labors are described with equal elements unease and grateful aid. The impatient lunch-break Slack ping from a peevish white boss completely units up the doom of the assembly that follows. It’s this eye for the rhythms and textures of life — of millennial digital media, of the dying by a thousand cuts supplied by office racism, of Maryland suburbia — that makes this novel vivid and alluring. “Homebodies” is the story of a younger Black lady’s quarter-life disaster as she wonders what her place on the earth shall be.

The novel opens on a well-calibrated set piece of suspense and disquiet. Mickey Hayward is a author at Wave, a Manhattan-based journal for younger ladies that was lately acquired by a digital media conglomerate. At an {industry} occasion, she is pulled apart in a second of perfunctory solidarity from Chelsea, one of many few different Black ladies on the firm, who delivers unhealthy information: Mickey’s job is in jeopardy. Nina, Mickey’s mercurial white boss, has been attempting to rent Chelsea’s buddy, one other Black author, to exchange her. Mickey, a striver with desires to make it huge, is crushed.

Social and emotional descent follows. Mickey is fired; lashes out at her nurturing associate, Lex; spirals into an unemployment-fueled despair; and posts a barn-burning letter to Twitter calling out the entrenched racism of the media {industry}. The letter is met with much less of a bang than a whimper (solely 4 likes, and full silence from her industry-girlies group chat). Battle with Lex explodes. And Mickey, spiraling, impetuously strikes out of the comfortable Astoria condo she and Lex and their cat share. Midway by means of the novel, she is now the “single-ish woman sitting alone on the Amtrak,” Kelela in her headphones, fleeing to the Maryland suburbs she had deserted for the promise of a flashy New York life.

Questions abound. Ought to Mickey open the Pandora’s field that’s her hometown ex, Tee? How lengthy can she cover out at her grandparents’ home, out of sight of her father, whom Mickey feels wounded by and can’t bear to disappoint with information of her firing? What ought to she do about Lex, future employment, the letter discarded into Twitter’s void?

“Homebodies” juggles the various issues that make a life, from work to romance to household to 1’s place on the earth. It calls to thoughts the archetypal hero’s journey: the traditional narrative template of a personality who leaves dwelling, goes on a dangerous journey, matures and, after tribulation and progress, returns reworked.

This narrative form canonically has been the area of males and people in any other case privileged by their societies, however “Homebodies” is worried, from its dedication web page onward, with the “women who look and love like” Denton-Hurst: queer Black ladies. Denton-Hurst writes the Maryland scenes with tenderness and perception. Tee, an erstwhile highschool basketball star who now works at Safeway whereas stunting on-line with a rotating forged of petite femmes, is especially nicely imagined. And Mickey is a fantastically drawn protagonist: a fancy younger lady who needs to be notable if not extraordinary, who lights up just because her messy ex calls her “celebrity,” who’s revealed, over the course of the ebook, to be, nicely, human. Which is to say impulsive, insecure, fragile, desirous and — when it counts most — courageous.

“Homebodies” contemporizes the hero’s journey, giving us a novel of affection, work and changing into for the digital age. All through, Denton-Hurst captures the which means of on-line communication, whether or not or not it’s Instagram evaluation, the sting of a bunch chat’s nonresponse or the swarm of Twitter. Mickey is attuned to all of this stuff, and the novel’s closing, in some methods, is a up to date innovation — Mickey could or could not get the woman, the ending intimates, however what she will find yourself with is a voice that folks will hearken to.

Sarah Thankam Mathews is the creator of “All This Might Be Completely different,” which was shortlisted for the 2022 Nationwide E book Award in fiction.

HOMEBODIES | By Tembe Denton-Hurst | 307 pp. | Harper/HarperCollins Publishers | $30