Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta
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4.1 • 14 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In this fantastically sharp novel, a trans woman reenters life on the outside after more than twenty years in a men’s prison, over one consequential Fourth of July weekend—from the author of the PEN/Faulkner Award winner Delicious Foods.
“Dangerously hilarious.” —Los Angeles Times
Carlotta Mercedes has been misunderstood her entire life. When she was pulled into a robbery gone wrong, she still went by the name she’d grown up with in Fort Greene, Brooklyn—before it gentrified. But not long after her conviction, she took the name Carlotta and 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, and often placed in solitary.
In her fifth appearance before the parole board, Carlotta is at last granted conditional freedom and returns to a much-changed New York City. Over a whirlwind Fourth of July weekend, she struggles to reconcile with the son she left behind, to reunite with a family reluctant to accept her true identity, and to avoid any minor parole infraction that might get her consigned back to lockup.
Written with the same astonishing verve of Delicious Foods, which dazzled critics and readers alike, 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. The novel sings with brio and ambition, delivering a fantastically entertaining read and a cast of unforgettable characters even as it challenges us to confront the glaring injustices of a prison system that continues to punish people long after their time has been served.
Winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Imagine someone falling off the face of the earth, only to reemerge 22 years later as a completely different person. That’s the story of Carlotta Mercedes, a trans woman trying to navigate Brooklyn during an eventful Fourth of July weekend after her release from prison. Novelist James Hannaham shows Carlotta’s outsize personality using frequent shifts between first- and third-person perspectives in a way that, no kidding, reminded us of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Carlotta’s strength and tenderness are highlighted by her interactions with an unfamiliar modern world, whether it’s hilarious riffs on new technology or her heartbreaking lost connection with her now-adult son. Rude wit and blunt emotional honesty make this story feel real and relatable, even when Carlotta is talking about her often-horrifying prison stint. Through it all, Carlotta is just a lot of fun to spend time with, making this an enjoyable yet thought-provoking novel that touches on everything from prison abuse to trans rights.
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.
