Delicious Foods

Starred review from January 26, 2015
Hannaham's (God Says No) seductive and disturbing second novel grips the reader from page one. In the prologue, 17-year-old Eddie has escaped from a farm somewhere in Louisiana, terrified he's headed closer to a place "where someone might capture or kill him, away toward freedom." Hannaham safely delivers Eddie into a new life, though one full of agonizing memories, "like dark birds poised to attack him." The narrative then shifts back to the story of Eddie's mother, Darlene, an educated woman devastated by the loss her husband, Nat, a community organizer in a small town in Louisiana. In her grief, Darlene disappears into a fog of drug use; Scotty, who is the book's charismatic narrator for most of the proceedings, is in fact the literal personification of crack ("Her idea of heaven was that the two of us could kick it together without nobody judging our relationship"). When Darlene is lured into taking a job on a mysterious farm, "it felt like the first luck Darlene had touched in the whole six years since she lost Nat." Instead, it's a horror show of human suffering, through which Darlene and Eddie struggle to reunite. Hannaham's skill at portraying the worst of human experience while keeping you glued to the pageâand totally taken with the charactersâis nothing short of magic. The light he shines on the realities of racial injustice, human trafficking, drug abuse, and exploitation make a deep imprint on the reader. But as devastating as Darlene, Eddie, and the other laborers' situations become, the heroic themes of love, forgiveness, and redemption carry this memorable story.

Starred review from January 15, 2015
A Southern farm provides the backdrop for a modern-day slavery tale in this textured, inventive and provocatively funny novel.The second novel by Hannaham (Creative Writing/Pratt Institute; God Says No, 2009) opens with a harrowing prologue: Eddie, a black 17-year-old, is manically driving a truck from a Louisiana plantation that he's escaped. His hands have been cut off for reasons not explained till the end of the novel, and he's desperate to get to Minnesota. The story then snaps back to six years earlier, as Eddie's mother, Darlene, descends into crack addiction after the murder of her husband, a shop owner and community organizer who fell afoul of local bigots. While working as a prostitute, she and other addicts and indigents are corralled by a woman into a van and coerced to sign a contract that effectively makes them the property of Delicious Foods, a produce farm that plies its workers with drugs and alcohol to extract cheap, unquestioning labor. What's so funny about any of that? Partly Hannaham's daring approach to style and point of view: Much of the novel is narrated by the crack Darlene is addicted to. Nicknamed Scotty, the drug first shows up as a few rocks in her purse as she works the streets and throughout has a voice like the devil on your shoulder. ("I rushed into the few doubting and unbelieving parts left in Darlene's mind and I shouted, Babygirl, surrender to yes! Say yes to good feelings!") The plot turns on Darlene's struggles at Delicious Foods and Eddie's efforts to find her, and in the process, Hannaham finds room to comment on and satirize a variety of racial (and racist) iconographies, from watermelons to David Duke to voodoo to the sexual demands of plantation owners. In that context, the fate of Eddie's hands becomes a potent allegory for centuries of black men and women stripped of the power to control their destinies. A poised and nervy study of race in a unique voice.

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Starred review from April 1, 2015
If The Great Gatsby was the Great American Novel of the twentieth century, Delicious Foods could be that of the early twenty-first. The hero is not a rich white man but a poor black kid in the South, Eddie, whose young life unravels when his activist father is murdered. Eddie's mom, Darlene, falls apart, each year bringing her closer to the streets, where eventually she is lured into a van to go work at Delicious Foods. The recruiters describe a rural farm with three-star accommodations, fair wages, and an open supply of crack cocaine, but only one of those promises proves to be true. Darlene and Eddie spend the next years sleeping on rusty bunk beds and working seven days a week for wages that are immediately eaten up by the company store and demerits doled out by their armed guards. When the owners of Delicious Foods are finally brought to justice, Darlene is faced with the painful choices of freedom: how to break free of her pain-erasing addiction, how to live without promises, how to feed her body and soul with truly good food that strengthens rather than kills. If the plot sounds like tough going, Hannaham's masterpiece is anything but. The writing makes it great, and the themes of pain, forgiveness, exploitation, and self-creation make it American. It is simply unmissable.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

September 15, 2014

Stunned by her husband's death, Darlene turns to drugs, which blunt her judgment so badly that she leaves behind her 11-year-old son for work at a mysterious, cagily run farm. Mother and son must struggle to reclaim each other--and to beat Darlene's addiction. Billed as a forthright study of race and the crack cocaine epidemic; from a Lambda Book Award finalist.

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