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    New People: A Novel
    Unavailable
    New People: A Novel
    Unavailable
    New People: A Novel
    Audiobook6 hours

    New People: A Novel

    Written by Danzy Senna

    Narrated by Kristen Ariza

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    FEATURED AS A PEOPLE MAGAZINE "PICK OF THE WEEK" AND A 2017 BEST SUMMER READ PICK BY

    Vogue • Elle • Harper's Bazaar • Glamour • Buzzfeed • Bustle • Ms. Magazine • Pop Sugar     • Newsday • The Millions • CNN's The Lead • The Fader

    "[A] cutting take on race and class...part dark comedy, part surreal morality tale. Disturbing and delicious." -People

    "You'll gulp Senna's novel in a single sitting—but then mull over it for days."     –Entertainment Weekly

    "Everyone should read it." –Vogue

    From the bestselling author of Caucasia, a subversive and engrossing novel of race, class and manners in contemporary America.

    As the twentieth century draws to a close, Maria is at the start of a life she never thought possible. She and Khalil, her college sweetheart, are planning their wedding. They are the perfect couple, "King and Queen of the Racially Nebulous Prom." Their skin is the same shade of beige. They live together in a black bohemian enclave in Brooklyn, where Khalil is riding the wave of the first dot-com boom and Maria is plugging away at her dissertation, on the Jonestown massacre. They've even landed a starring role in a documentary about "new people" like them, who are blurring the old boundaries as a brave new era dawns. Everything Maria knows she should want lies before her--yet she can't stop daydreaming about another man, a poet she barely knows. As fantasy escalates to fixation, it dredges up secrets from the past and threatens to unravel not only Maria's perfect new life but her very persona.

    Heartbreaking and darkly comic, New People is a bold and unfettered page-turner that challenges our every assumption about how we define one another, and ourselves.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateAug 1, 2017
    ISBN9781524776862
    Unavailable
    New People: A Novel
    Author

    Danzy Senna

    Danzy Senna was born in Boston in 1970. She graduated from Stanford University and received her MFA in creative writing from the University of California. FROM CAUCASIA, WITH LOVE is her first novel.

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    Reviews for New People

    3.5/5

    43 ratings4 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This book was definitely interesting, with the narrator Maria making for a complex and layered character, although I had a lot of misgivings about whether she was a reliable narrator and the wisdom of many of her choices. I can see why this book would resonate with many, and it kinda did with me, but not completely. My feelings towards the book are mixed - I honestly can't say either that I liked it or didn't like it.
    • 4/5
      This is an uncomfortable book.You know those tv shows where people are doing things so... not right, embarrassing, just wrong, that you can't stand to watch it?because it's a book, we can get closer. we can see each little mental step Maria takes that leads down this awkward road. We're uncomfortable because she's uncomfortable and she doesn't know any way out of it.
    • 4/5
      This novel made me think. I’ve been white all my life, never really thought about it, certainly didn’t ever wonder if I or my friends and family were doing whiteness right. I think, aside from the KKK, Nazis and other such groups, we white folk just take our whiteness for granted (it may be different in the south). Maria is what she terms as a one dropper, just barely, barely has African American heritage. She and her boyfriend and his sister are the objects of a documentary called “New People” about mixed race younger people. To my mind she’s a pretty unlikeable character because she is completely self centered. She obsesses about race and rightness and uses race to beat people over the head, and she is loyal to no one but herself. She was adopted by a single black woman when she was 6 months old and was whiter than her mother wanted, but still Grace, her mother, seemed to give her all the love and guidance she needed. How did she end up this way? This book could be used to get people of different races talking with each other mainly because it points up our blind spots. I’ll be thinking about it for a while.
    • 4/5
      New People by Senna Danzy is a 2017 Riverhead Books publication. Unconventional, a little disturbing, but thought provoking and exceptionally written-Despite its brevity, this book packs a potent punch, written in a quirky, offbeat prose, that captured my attention and forced me to stay focused. The novel is, without a doubt, about race. ‘New People’ meaning ‘biracial'. However, there is more to the story than meets the eye. Maria and her fiancé Khalil are both biracial- Maria’s adoptive mother was black, but Maria is very fair skinned, as is Khalil, whose background is eclectic. Maria is doing her dissertation on the ‘Jonestown Massacre’, while planning her wedding. But, her relationship with Khalil is tested when she develops a crush on a poet, who is not biracial. Suddenly, her stable life becomes very erratic as she searches for that elusive something that remains just out of reach. The book is almost satirical at times, has a wry sense of humor, but is also very tense. Maria has a dark secret she’s kept from Khalil and she practically stalks her ‘crush’, as well as exhibiting a few other very odd behaviors that had me sitting on the edge of my seat. Maria is the prominent character, the one whose narrative we follow as she sends herself down a path of self-discovery, a very risky journey that could upend her life as she knows it. She is a most unusual person, not necessarily a likeable young lady, or someone I felt I could bond with or feel empathy towards, but I found her choices almost hypnotic. At times I couldn’t bear to watch and at others I couldn’t bear to look away. I had to see what, if any, consequences or repercussions there would be for her actions. The Jonestown topic runs in the background as it harkens back to the themes that brought the cult followers to such a point in their lives and is juxtaposed against the attitudes that came about in the nineties, especially in campus life. It’s an interesting force in Maria’s search for her own identity. The ending is a bit abrupt. Khalil appears oblivious to Maria’s angst or past sins, so we are left to wonder if Maria’s thirst has been quenched or if her search will continue or evolve to include her fiancé. I found Maria to be one of the most interesting characters I’ve been introduced to recently and this book did make me stop and think about many of the topics addressed here, even days after finishing the novel. I enjoyed the style of writing, and the refreshing change of pace this book provided. This is my first book by this author, but I will definitely keep an eye out for her work in the future. 4 stars

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