Yet she remains almost emotionless about these elements, she is almost anesthetized to potential joys or fears, always focused on doing what’s right and expected of her. There are subtle suggestions and mentions of other things going on in her life that contradict the perfect life she has cultivated – a (forced) affair with a higher up, and the diagnosis of a serious illness that could potentially kill her.

Actually it left me wanting more, I was disappointed when the book ended right before the actual party began because I wanted to see how the evening played out for our narrator. I love a short book for many reasons, including the fact that authors who write short books are forced to include only the best of their writing, which is why I think this book is so taut and concise – no sentence is unnecessary. The short dialogue included between her and her boyfriend is stilted, and he comes off as a self-obsessed narcissist who sees her as a symbol rather than a real person.

The book ends with her trip to her boyfriend’s family’s estate for a lavish garden party, questioning whether she fits in there at all. Much of this pressure to succeed comes from her family’s situation, the fact that as immigrants they could only get so far in their lives, but they’ve sacrificed so she could rise higher in hers. She has gone to school and gotten good grades, then a good job, then saved her money to buy a house, and is dating a good, white man with family money. She is smart and incredibly hard-working, receiving a promotion above some of her white male colleagues, but as she is being told about her promotion they mention she is an example of their company’s ‘diversity’, which of course steals away any feelings of accomplishment. We are thrown into the life of an unnamed, young black woman who works at high-pressure blue-chip company. It’s difficult to slot this book into one category it reads like a cross between poetry and memoir, but it’s listed as fiction (most likely with a dash of realism because I have no doubt Brown also experienced many of these things). But what if that mark of success isn’t what everyone is striving for, it’s simply what we are told to strive for? The life of this particular woman is marked with the challenges she faces as a black woman in a largely male, white sector of high finance, and the success she has achieved in the traditional sense of the word. Although Assembly by Natasha Brown doesn’t include Covid, the thoughts that cross the protagonist’s mind are certainly relatable as we all sit at home and ponder LIFE. It touches upon race, class, gender, and the existential dread that millennials in particular seem to dwell upon, (what does it all mean? etc.) made even worse by the pandemic.

This slim little novel piqued my interest when I saw a short description of it in a catalogue.

Assembly by natasha brown review