Mind is rollingFredrik de Boer (Coffee shop). This debut novel tells the story of a young woman's loss of ethnographic detachment. Alice, a mid-level student at a state university in Oklahoma, slips from youthful confusion into sleepless paranoia. Her madness spills over into everyday life: an arrangement with a shower stall becomes evidence of a conspiracy, and her breakdown juxtaposes coursework, connections, and trips to TJ Maxx. Avoiding romance and melodrama, deBoer writes in a dispassionate register that reflects Alice's dissociation. The strength of the novel lies in its merciless banality: the mind is seething, but the mechanisms of life are working. During her slow recovery, Alice develops a “deep intuition” about her medications, which she suspects interact “like hot-tempered roommates in the shabby apartment of her brain.”
Select colorSuvankham Thammavongsa (Small, Brown). “Everyone is ugly. I should know. I look at people all day.” So begins this coolly observant novel by a famous short story writer, narrated by a nail salon owner. The owner, a forty-year-old former boxer, claims to have no interest in other people. Yet she shows herself to be acutely sensitive to the wants and concerns of her clients, as well as to the lives of her employees, four Southeast Asian women whose naughty characteristics include matching haircuts and name tags. With dark humor and brief undertones of tenderness, Thammavongsa's portrait of working-class life casts standard elements—a damaged narrator, a workforce made up entirely of women of color—in an alienating light.
