Briefly Noted Book Reviews - The New Yorker

Daylight Come, by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro (Penguin Press). This biography of Harry Belafonte, who died in 2023, paints the singer and civil-rights activist as “our first post-racial pop star.” In his music, Belafonte sought to honor his Caribbean heritage—he was born in Harlem to Jamaican parents in 1927—without being reduced to a mere exotic persona. Throughout his career, he merged his work as an entertainer with his political convictions (he refused to perform in segregated venues, for instance), a pursuit that required him to square his fame “with his anger at the society that gave it to him.” Jelly-Schapiro draws on a range of sources, including conversations with Belafonte, presenting a portrait of a formidable figure who, as Belafonte’s son puts it, “was serving two families: us and the family of Man.”

Scavenging Beauty, by Angelica Glass (Riverhead). Memories of a childhood marked by economic hardship and abuse intertwine with the natural world in this graceful début memoir, which is structured around the author’s seven-year project of walking every street in Santa Cruz County, in California. Glass, a former child-welfare social worker, writes with quiet precision about growing up as one of eight children with a mother whose love often turned into violence, and a father whose failures cast an equally enduring shadow. Encounters with shifting coastlines, towering redwoods, and mycelial networks spark meditations on inheritance, resilience, and the work of remaking a life.

Illustration by Henri Campeã

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Dooneen, by Keith Ridgway (New Directions). This strange, ambitious novel is set in a version of Dublin where cars have been banned and people enter the country by teleportation. Bartholomew Port, an Irish writer living in London, returns to his homeland to participate in a literary festival, and arrives on the eve of a populist uprising. Dublin, he observes, has become a machine “for enriching the rich” and “impoverishing the poor,” a place where “life is not as important as money.” As Port falls in with a group of conspirators preparing for the insurrection, the book takes on a hallucinatory, digressive quality, blurring the lines between life and death, reality and illusion. Ultimately, Ridgway asks what responsibility bystanders must take for the injustices around them.

Queen Mab, by Emily McBride (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Madeleine is a “promising” twenty-three-year-old graduate student who decides, to the shock of other academic women in her life, to have a baby. (“They all say congrats, by the way, and better you than them,” one colleague says.) The body horror of birth gives way to the fairy-tale horror of early motherhood, which McBride, a translator based in Barcelona, strews with literary Easter eggs from folktales and Victorian poetry. Is the baby really a baby, or has it been replaced by a changeling? Is Madeleine still herself, or has she been stolen away, too? Can her husband be trusted? The result is an agile, unsettling novel about the unwinding of a mind, set in a world of women who view motherhood as a curious affectation.

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