The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris

And her locs – each one as thick as a bubble tea straw and longer than her arms – started out as a deep brown, then turned blonde as they continued past her ears. Her skin was a shade or two darker than Nella’s maple complexion, falling somewhere between hickory and pecan. The girl had a wide, symmetrical face, and two almond-colored eyes perfectly spaced between a Lena Horne nose and a generous forehead. Enter a fresh “OBG” or Other Black Girl, Hazel-May McCall, smelling distinctly of Brown Buttah, a fragant cocoa butter hair product that’s also a staple in Nella’s haircare regimen. Career stagnation is both a risk and a reality.

The work environment at Wagner is one where “open-space assistants” subsist on leftovers and fruit while their superiors dine at swanky restaurants and vacation in summer homes. But her boss implies that Nella’s focus is off-kilter: “I wish you’d put half the effort you put into those extracurricular diversity meetings into working on the core requirements.” She’s been there for two years, and she’s ripe for a promotion. Nella represents a new, younger generation of would-be editors hoping to infuse cultural diversity and equity into an industry that has historically excluded people of colour. When Nella joins, it’s been well over two decades since Wagner’s brilliant but scandal-engulfed black editor fled New York City, desperately scratching her itching scalp – a cleverly placed hint of the way Harris’s novel will use the importance of hair products in the lives of black women to startling effect.

The heroine is Nella Rogers, an ambitious black editorial assistant at Wagner Books, a prestigious American publishing house where white Ivy League graduates with trust funds take on low-wage editorial salaries in order to ascend the corporate ladder. T here’s a loneliness in being the only one it resonates throughout Zakiya Dalila Harris’s imaginative and audacious debut novel.

The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris