Blanche on the Lam
Written on July 17th, 2022 by Barbara Neely
This book was selected by your mod team, based on the winning genre of mystery, selected in our community poll.
The mods who nominated the book for mod consideration, have a few words to share on why they made this suggestion:
“Neither of us are big mystery readers per se, but one of our favorite humans, adrienne maree brown (author, podcaster, visionary), recommended Blanche on the Lam on an episode of The Parables Podcast (yes, there’s a podcast for Parable of the Sower, and all Octavia Butler’s works! Can’t recommend it enough). Independently of one another, we both added it to our ever-growing TBRs… So, when y’all chose ‘mystery’ as the theme, we did a buddy speed-read and both became quite smitten with Blanche.
This classic mystery set-up features a unique detective in a feisty, no-nonsense, middle-aged, African American housekeeper. From contextualizing the mystery in Blanche’s own life experience, to delivering witty one-liners, this book delivers a satisfying ‘whodunnit’ plot but flips the script on many tropes of the genre. Instead of a social elite pretending to be the help, our heroine is a woman who has been working in domestic service for years and takes a dodgy job because of her own complications with the criminal punishment system.
Blanche is funny, practical, has a network of friends and family that she relies on for help (no depressed loner detective here), and is full of dignity in spite of difficult circumstances. Throughout the book, Blanche doesn’t hold back providing commentary on race, class, and disability among other subjects.
We love this opportunity to introduce a Black author to our community, in a genre that can feel dominated by white authors, and we love how reading familiar stories through new eyes expands our ability to see nuance and complexity in other people. We hope you all enjoy Blanche as much as we did and we look forward to chatting with you about her in the branches.”
