Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta
A novel
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
The humorous and heart-wrenching story of a woman's re-entry into life on the outside after twenty years in incarceration, told over one whirlwind Fourth of July weekend.
"There's no one quite like Carlotta Mercedes, the transgender Black Colombian heroine – no, star – of the second novel by Hannaham."
—THE OBSERVER
When Carlotta Mercedes was pulled into a robbery gone wrong, she still went by the name she was born with. But not long after her conviction, she began to live as a woman, an embrace of selfhood that prison authorities rejected, keeping Carlotta trapped in an all-male cell block, abused by both inmates and guards.
Over twenty years later, Carlotta is granted conditional freedom and returns to a much-changed Brooklyn, where she struggles to reconcile with a family reluctant to accept her identity, and to avoid any minor parole infraction that might get her consigned back to lockup.
Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta sweeps the reader through seemingly every street of Brooklyn, much as Joyce's Ulysses does through Dublin. Hannaham introduces a cast of unforgettable characters even as it challenges us to confront the glaring injustices of a society and prison system that continues to punish people long after their time has been served.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
PEN/Faulkner award winner Hannaham (Delicious Foods) returns with a timely if sometimes frustrating depiction of life on the edges of America's prison-industrial complex. Carlotta Mercedes comes home to Brooklyn after serving more than 20 years in prison for armed robbery. Carlotta, a Black and Colombian trans woman who was abused in prison, is a live wire, by turns self-pitying, angry, thoughtful, and raunchily funny. Carlotta's series of antic encounters with family members, her parole officer, and old friends from the neighborhood doesn't amount to much of a story, but it gives plenty of opportunities for Carlotta to riff and grouse. Late in the book, after she's robbed of $500 she'd tucked in her underwear next to what she calls her Señora Problema, Carlotta imagines the thief trying to spend the money at a department store: "I'm sorry, Sir, this money reeks a pussy. Bloomingdale policy be that we don't assept no kinda pussystank moneys." She has plenty of wit and verve, and readers are sure to cheer on Carlotta's doomed efforts to stay clean and out of trouble, but, even so, the underplotted chronicle tends to lag. It's fun for a while, but it's not the author's best.
