The description didn't really match the book, but that's ok here! No spoiler, but interesting ending given the "returns home to heal" theme.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for granting me free access to the advanced digital copy of this book, as this book has already been published, I will not share my review on Netgalley at this time.

https://lesbrary.com/a-soft-place-for-queer-black-women-to-land-homebodies-by-tembe-denton-hurst/

Mickey is a Black queer author in NYC trying to make a name for herself. She knows that she’s a great writer, with incisive commentary and an eye for the kinds of stories that tap into the conversations happening right now. The problem is she doesn’t have much of an opportunity to use these skills. The magazine she writes for has new ownership who are skeptical of her ideas, especially the ones that centre Blackness or queerness. She’s stuck writing inane celebrity news stories on tight deadlines, coming home exhausted.

She lives with her girlfriend, Lex, who is supportive and caring—and also close with her mother, who rejects Mickey and Lex’s queerness in general. She’s tried to break them up multiple times. Despite all the good in their relationship, it’s a fight they circle back to over and over.

This is a quiet, contemplative novel about a low point in Mickey’s life. It’s so character-based that it’s hard to describe the plot without spoiling anything: the events on the back cover don’t all happen until about 75% of the way through the book. So if you don’t want to know anything about what happens — though this book really isn’t about the events as much as Mickey’s processing of them—keep that in mind.

When Mickey is fired from her job and quickly replaced, she free falls. Lex worries that she’s just staying on the couch eating takeout for weeks, not even looking for a new job. But Mickey faced so much racism at her last job, including in how she was let go, that she’s not sure what to do now. So she does the last thing she expected from herself: she goes home, to Maryland. While staying with grandmother, she grapples with what to do next—made even more complicated when she bumps into her ex.

Tembe Denton-Hurst wrote an article at the Cut titled “It Doesn’t Matter If We Behave” that offers some background into why she wrote Homebodies, especially in the impossible standards for “professionalism” for Black women. She explains that she wanted to provide Mickey a “soft place to land,” a chance to process her feelings, instead of having to just push through and follow the unwritten rules of navigating these spaces as a Black woman.

I felt so tense reading the first section of this book, because as someone who now works in digital media, her experience feels like a literal nightmare. Writing on strict deadlines, having a supervisor who clearly doesn’t respect you, going through endless microaggressions that have the thinnest veneer of plausible deniability so that you can’t point to any one thing as the glaring example—I can’t imagine doing that day after day.

Mickey is a bit of a mess, and this is a confusing in-between point in her life. It’s mostly interior, and there are no neat conclusions to her story. She’s still figuring herself out, still deciding how to navigate a no-win situation. This is one I’m really interested to see other readers’ response to, especially other queer Black women.

Mickey works for a flashy media company but wants to write stories that matter. When she gets fired rather unceremoniously, she lashes out and fires back with a letter that details the racism and sexism she’s experienced as a Black woman in the company, sure that it will cause a ripple effect. When she’s met with crickets, Mickey returns to her hometown to re-evaluate her life and her relationship with her long-term girlfriend. But the comforts of home and an old flame threaten to upend everything Mickey thought she wanted for her life.

This debut made a lot of “most-anticipated” lists for this summer, and I was really excited to read it because it sounded so promising. The first third or so is pretty compelling, but the novel flounders, noticeably and considerably, when Mickey goes home. The plot struggles to move forward, and while Mickey is definitely an interesting character (and often infuriating, to be honest), the rest of the cast feels half-baked. Also: this one could have used a stronger editing hand: it’s overly long and the prose is definitely overwritten in parts.

Denton-Hurst’s prose throughout the book is great. The characters feel authentic and nuanced overall, and the imagery (especially food imagery!) was spot on for me. I also appreciated the depiction of queer women of color and the lasting impacts of relationships, though I admit I don’t care much for romance personally.

However, the plot doesn’t deliver for me. The ‘letter’ discussed in the novel blurb? Well-written and gripping – but you don’t get to read it until pages 290-291, towards the very end of the book. Saving it for so late didn’t give it extra impact; it just made it frustrating to read about Mickey Hayward (MC) obsessing over it all up until that point. The letter also “blows up,” but with no real lasting impact in the novel. It felt anticlimactic.

This book is nothing like what the blurb describes.

The MC is uninteresting, and consistently makes bad decisions that are really just evidence of poor writing. For a writer, our MC is pretty unintelligent. Poor decision making can work in a story but it doesn't work in this one. We were never shown anything that would support the characters boringness and inability to make good decisions or at least follow the advice of those around her.

Tembe Denton-Hurst is a new author for me, and I really enjoyed the snarky, witty writing style in this book.

Gorgeous prose and an enjoyable snarky tone but this was a little, uh, sexier than anticipated in a way that felt appropriately sterile but also difficult to read.

Mickey’s life was finally going according to plan, and her flashy media job was bringing her dreams of being an influential writer within reach. But then she got fired. Furious enough to reveal the anti-Black racism she’d faced in her job, she posted a searing open letter online…which no one read. It isn’t until Mickey returns to her hometown and considers giving up her dream that drama in the industry draws her back in.

This is a quiet, complex, vulnerable novel about the real people behind viral moments. Mickey is messy and deeply imperfect, and this novel takes place during what might be the lowest point of her life. I think it's really powerful to show a raw, relatable character trying to decide if the career she's worked toward for her entire life is worth the pain it causes her. It's also got sapphic romantic drama, which is obviously extremely my shit!

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC of this book. The beginning of this story was very engaging as I got to know the narrator and the context of her life. Once she retreated to her hometown, the story dragged a bit, and then the ending felt very abrupt and left me wanting to know more about what happened next. Overall I enjoyed this queer story, especially because the queerness was both very present and not the main storyline.

Thank you to NetGalley, author Tembe Denton-Hurst, and Harper for providing me with a free ARC in exchange for my honest opinion!

This book was exactly my favorite type of book to read: contemporary, literary fiction that is coming-of-age for a black, queer woman in her 20s who works in the literary field and is experience hardships both personally and professionally. AND IT WAS SO WELL DONE!! This is an extremely important book, as the main character Mickey is experiencing micro-aggressions and racism at her workplace that eventually lead to her being fired. As she speaks out about it, no one hears at first until suddenly her post goes viral. Denton-Hurst has a magnetic writing style, and I was enraptured the whole time. I was invested in both the story and Mickey as a character; everything felt so realistic, from what she was experiencing at work to the complicated feelings of both grief and relief of being fired to her group chat ignoring her to finding both peace and stress going back home. As much as I did love this book, there was one major plot point that I had issue with, and that was the focus on the relationship between Mickey and Tee. I was soooo invested in the book until about 50%, and then from 50-85% through the book, I was losing interest until the last bit because of the hyper-fixation on this toxic relationship. I felt too much time was spent on it, and while I get that it was written in this way to juxtapose Mickey's relationship with her current girlfriend, I think that there would have been better ways to address this topic. I wanted to see more of the book focused on her career aspect rather than romantic situation because it ended up feeling a bit harried and rushed at the end for me personally. However, I still really loved this book, and I think it's an important read for today's day and age. This did not read like a debut novel at all to me, and I look forward to checking out more works from Tembe Denton-Hurst!

I loved this! Spot on depictions of being a 20-something working in media in New York City, and the pull between your dreams and your roots that can occur. Also a much-needed and appreciated messy lesbian story and Black lesbian main character.

I honestly don't remember requesting this book might have been by accident. Or my request was accepted too late for me to consider it for my list. Either way I didn't get a chance to read it.

I quite loved this book honestly. Mickey and her friends drew me in right away and it was so easy to see myself in her (as a black woman who else enjoys writing/in the literary world). I was looking forward to this read as it was intended to be a bit of a break from my thrillers and mysteries that I usually read; I’m pleased to say it was a welcomed read that left me wanting more and wishing that Mickey were a pal I could call up for a chat.

**Big thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an eARC copy in exchange for an honest review.

This one is a hard one for me to review. I'm happy I read it. The stories of queer, black women are two far and few between. My only hangup is that I didn't really care for the characters. That being said, I could see it being very important to other readers and thus it absolutely has a place on library shelves.

This book wasn't for me, but it very well could be for others. For me, I was confused by the pacing of the book--it shifted focus and dug deep into moments that could have done with a passing glance. It felt like the book was trying to shine a light on every detail, but in so doing I didn't especially care about any of them. I also am generally not compelled by nostalgia, and this book leaned heavily on nostalgia for the last 3/4.

I did appreciate how nuanced and ambiguous the characters were. I liked the lack of tidiness and the refusal to put anyone in just one box. Everyone contained multitudes, and that was richly presented on the page. But the relationships between the characters--try as they did to have texture--read like an attempt to do what Leesa Cross-Smith does, just not quite as well. Whereas with Cross-Smith, her shifting gaze and focus guides the reader to what we must see, here Denton-Hurst seemed unable to decide what was most salient so tried to make us see everything. I would have preferred more of a guiding hand.

The book bills itself as a woman who writes a manifesto that goes viral, but the virality doesn't occur till the final 1/4 of the book so rather it's mostly a story of a woman who is fired and rudderless in her relationships and revisits her past to try to find her footing. Described this way I would have had more realistic expectations of the book's heavy lean on the MC's look to her past to try to understand her present.