Colored Television (A GMA Book Club Pick)
A Novel
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3.6 • 117 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK
A WASHINGTON POST TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2024
“A laugh-out-loud cultural comedy… This is the New Great American Novel, and Danzy Senna has set the standard.” –LA Times
“Funny, foxy and fleet…The jokes are good, the punches land, the dialogue is tart.” –Dwight Garner, The New York Times
A brilliant take on love and ambition, failure and reinvention, and the racial-identity-industrial complex from the bestselling author of Caucasia
Jane has high hopes that her life is about to turn around. After a long, precarious stretch bouncing among sketchy rentals and sublets, she and her family are living in luxury for a year, house-sitting in the hills above Los Angeles. The gig magically coincides with Jane’s sabbatical, giving her the time and space she needs to finish her second novel—a centuries-spanning epic her artist husband, Lenny, dubs her “mulatto War and Peace.” Finally, some semblance of stability and success seems to be within her grasp.
But things don’t work out quite as hoped. Desperate for a plan B, like countless writers before her Jane turns her gaze to Hollywood. When she finagles a meeting with Hampton Ford, a hot producer with a major development deal at a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer,” and together they begin to develop “the Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies.” Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.
Funny, piercing, and page turning, Colored Television is Senna’s most on-the-pulse, ambitious, and rewarding novel yet.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
An author’s struggle to break into Hollywood has her spinning in circles in this dazzling and thoughtful dark comedy. As a young biracial woman, Jane dreamed of a bohemian lifestyle, making meaningful art with her perfect husband and exceptional children. Now, on sabbatical from her job as a writing professor, Jane is trying unsuccessfully to publish her second novel, a historical epic her painter husband calls “the mulatto War and Peace.” Desperate to provide for her family, Jane puts her misgivings aside and attempts to enter a world she never respected: writing for television. Author Danzy Senna skilfully walks a fine line between screwball comedy and tragedy, filling Jane’s story with pointed observations on art, interracial marriage, and generational divides. Colored Television is an anti-coming-of-age tale, sardonically exploring what happens when your dreams meet reality. This is a laugh-out-loud novel that’ll also surprise you regularly.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A struggling Los Angeles novelist succumbs to Hollywood's siren call in the mordant latest from Senna (Caucasia). Jane, the daughter of an interracial couple, is on a one-year sabbatical from her creative writing professorship. She's trying to finish her sprawling, long-languishing second novel, a "mulatto War and Peace" about literature's mixed-race heroines. When her editor reacts to the manuscript with confusion, Jane questions her commitment to an art form that, in her view, has been superseded by prestige television: "Being a novelist in Los Angeles was not unlike being an Amish person." Concealing her plan from her husband, an abstract painter unwilling to make concessions to the market, Jane successfully pitches an idea for a biracial comedy to Hampton Ford, a Black TV showrunner looking for "diverse content," and is plunged into the shark-filled waters of Hollywood creators. The novel generates some suspense through Jane's and Ford's various ethical lapses, but it's predominantly carried along by the strength of Senna's sardonic voice, which homes in on everything from the photogenic qualities of mixed-race children ("No one wants to have white babies anymore") to the debilitating effects on a writer of leading fiction workshops, which Senna likens to a "series of mini-strokes." The result is a complex and satisfying portrait of a woman at odds with the categories that define her.
Customer Reviews
Nice book i love it 🎀
Nice book i love it 🎀
Do not recommend
I truly disliked this book. The main character was impossible to root for. She was a liar and deeply unlikable. The remainder of the characters were all stereotypes.
Expected, Typical…
Of course a script is going to get stolen.
Of course it will happen to a poor person.
Of course this poor person is a parent.
Of course this person is a mother, woah flash, a woman…
Of course the husband is an artist.
… etc. …
Don’t know now the first thing about the competitive writing environment in Los Angeles, but this was interesting.
… but there wasn’t anything revolutionary about making the protagonist a person of color…. … and with the trappings of a pseudo life provided by a, you guessed it, white person, a white man….
Of course the Subaru driving mom took drugs to enhance her creativity….
(Bless LA and the industry, lookin’ bleak).