Book Reviews
The frankness with which New People treats race as a kind of public performance is both uncomfortable and strangely cathartic.… Provocative.
Wall Street Journal
It says a great deal for New People—Danzy Senna’s martini-dry, espresso-dark comedy of contemporary manners — that its compound of caustic observations and shrewd characterizations could only have emerged from a writer as finely tuned to her social milieu as [Jane] Austen was to hers.… [A]rtfully strewn with excruciating and uproarious misperceptions…[New People] doesn’t pour cold water on one’s expectations for a better, more tolerant world. In fact, it implies that world has, to a great extent, already arrived.
Newsday
Slick and highly enjoyable.… Thrillingly, blackness is not hallowed in Senna’s work, nor is it impervious to pathologies of ego. Senna particularly enjoys lampooning the search for racial authenticity.… Identity, far from being a point of solidarity, is a beckoning void, and adroit comedy quickly liquefies into absurd horror.
New Yorker
Compellingly provocative.… [Senna] creat[es] a dense psychological portrait of a black woman nearing the close of the 20th century: inquisitive, obsessive, imaginative, alive.
New Republic
An of-the-moment novel [that] tackles identity and infatuation…slender but powerful, as seductive and urgent as a phone call from an old flame. At first blush, the book seems like a straightforward love story…but it’s more complicated than that.… This is not a book about race disguised as a romance, nor is it a love story saddled with a moral. Senna’s achievement is that she interlaces both threads in one ingenious tale.
Oprah Magazine
Danzy Senna bores into the dynamics of race, identity, heritage, poverty, and privilege in contemporary America.… Agile and ambitious, the novel is also a wild-hearted romance about secrets and obsessions, a dramedy of manners about educated middle-class blacks — the talented tenth — that is Senna’s authorial home ground.
Elle
In many ways, lines of color, alongside the complexities of what it means to pass as one thing or another, may be what best defines Danzy Senna’s epochal — in its most literal sense — new novel.… [It] is a paean to the psychosocial complexities of being racially mixed, and, as a result, color-lines, passing, and double-consciousness are everywhere.… The novel’s ultimate message seems, however, to be one both true and unsettling, if unsurprising: that color-lines have never left America and likely never will.
Los Angeles Review of Books
A darkly comic novel about race, about false utopias, and about the fine line between seemingly innocuous, everyday groupthink—the kind that’s the price of admission for being part of a marriage, or a band of friends, or a tribe of any sort.… Senna writes beautifully about the complexity of identity, the intersection of racial consciousness, and class awareness, and individual perspective.
Vogue
Set in the Rodney King-era ‘90s, New People is as mesmerizingly fast-paced as it is deeply reflective of monumental truths that resonate perhaps even more powerfully two decades in the future.
Harper’s Bazaar
[A] muddled third novel featuring a protagonist in search of her identity.… [D]iscussions about racism and white privilege…and a side plot involving Maria’s attempts to finish her dissertation…. Significant themes and issues…unfortunately get lost before fully landing.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [W]ell-constructed, brooding novel.… [A] great read, both compelling and thoughtful …[with] a page-turning urgency…. Maria tumbles toward a disaster of her own making, while her musings on race shift between provocative and cynical. —Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA
Library Journal
Senna’s meditation on 1996 America and its false sense of progress is an eerie picture of society today, too. With a dark sense of humor, Senna builds her story with a horror-like tension that releases with a tongue-in-cheek sigh. Sure to keep readers riding white-knuckled to the end.
Booklist
(Starred review.) Senna's fearless novel is equal parts beguiling and disturbing.… Every detail and subplot, including Maria's dissertation on the Jonestown massacre and her buried secret about a college prank gone awry, is resonant. A great book about race and a great book all around.!!!
Kirkus Reviews