New People

June 19, 2017
Senna (Caucasia) returns to long-form fiction in a muddled third novel featuring a protagonist in search of her identity. It’s 1996 in slowly gentrifying New York, and 27-year-old Maria and her college sweetheart Khalil, both mixed-race, are planning their wedding. They’re also the stars of a new documentary called New People about interracial couples. But there’s a catch—one that grows comically large as the story progresses: Maria’s obsessed with a soft-spoken, brown-skinned poet whom she barely knows, but suspects is her soul mate. Her stalking takes on an air of implausibility as she sneaks into his apartment building, impersonates the next door neighbor’s nanny, and crawls into his open window while he’s not home—and those aren’t even the worst of her creepy maneuvers. Interspersed with her complaining about the state of her otherwise stable current relationship with Khalil are flashbacks to her disastrous dating life in college before she met and “saved” him from being the “token... cool black guy at the frat party”; discussions about racism and white privilege; remembrances of her adopted mother before she died from breast cancer at 49; and a side plot involving Maria’s attempts to finish her dissertation on the mass suicide at Jonestown. Significant themes and issues are touched upon here but unfortunately get lost before fully landing.

Maria and Khalil are Brooklyn hipsters before the term "hipster" becomes mainstream or pejorative. Kristen Ariza narrates with hipster ennui. While Senna's writing requires listeners to understand the complexities of race and class, Ariza's narration is likely to muddle that understanding and, in doing so skew, the listening experience. This is unfortunate because the novel peels its characters experiences like an onion. What is the source of Maria's obsession with the Poet? Why would she reject Khalil, "a good man," even in her mother's estimation? And who are the New People, really? How do they fit with the "old people," the unambiguous (stereotypical?) blacks and whites in their world? Senna's writing survives Ariza's spiritless treatment, but not without blemishes. M.P.P. � AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

February 1, 2018

Senna (Caucasia), the child of a Caucasian poet mother and an African American scholar father, bestows her own middle name, Maria, to her newest mixed-race protagonist, one half of an engaged couple who share the same favorite song, films, novel, even "skin...the same shade of beige." Having met at Stanford, Khalil and Maria now live in Brooklyn, he creating a start-up, she finishing her dissertation. Their imagined future includes "a tribe of children...and a big hairy dog named Thurgood." Despite the outward perfection, Maria's commitment is wavering as her obsession for a nameless "poet" manifests into stalking, stealing, breaking and entering--even baby-sitting. Kristen Ariza narrates Senna's complex, brilliant, post-racial takedown with fluid ease, convincingly even-keeled despite Maria's antics--from the insidious (a prank call threatening lynching) to the pitiful. VERDICT Libraries should provide Senna's sly, provoking, dazzling latest in all formats. ["A great read, both compelling and thoughtful. The narrative has a page-turning urgency, as Maria tumbles toward a disaster of her own making, while her musings on race shift between provocative and cynical": LJ 6/1/17 starred review of the Riverhead hc.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

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