Like a Sister

A young woman who is estranged from her sister and father - a popular internet influencer and a highly-successful entertainment mogul respectively = needs answers when her sister is found dead in the Bronx, assumed to be an accidental overdose. That would never happen. She hated needles. And she would never be caught north of Manhattan. Unless she was trying to connect with the sister she hadn't spoken to ever since a fateful car accident. returnreturnI struggled a bit at first with this book. Though our protagonist is level-headed, rides a bike to get around town, and lives with an aunty in an unfashionable area while going to graduate school, there's a barrage of brand-dropping to the point that it seemed to be more about wealthy excess as a way of life than about solving the mystery. (I also felt the narrator's constant use of metaphors were sometimes a stretch, though there's certainly a precedent in American crime fiction to use clever similes going back to the hardboiled tradition.) But the more I read, the more absorbed I was. The damage done by excessive consumerism and display of wealth through social media is a major theme, and it's refreshing to read a Black author writing about Black people without focusing on poverty, but at the same time being honest about how racism shapes the lives of even the most successful people living in a racist society. It's honest without making it the focal point. And that's one of the strengths of the novel, it's not about white folks. I ended up really enjoying it, and it has some great twists and turns.