Briefly Noted

Black in Blues, by Imani Perry (Ecco). This cultural history of the color blue, and how it threads through Black lives and “the peculiar institution of slavery,” opens with the indigo trade in the sixteenth century. The dye’s production by enslaved individuals was, Perry writes, “an early and clear example of a global desire to harness blue beauty into personal possession.” Touching on a range of historical, artistic, musical, and literary references—from the color’s significance in Yoruba cosmology to the blue candles used in hoodoo rituals to the “tremor” of the “blue note”—Perry illuminates how the color has been variously associated with mourning, spiritual strength, and forces of freedom and oppression.

American Laughter, American Fury, by Eran A. Zelnik (Johns Hopkins). This sobering history tracks how humor, with “its double-edged nature,” was deployed on this side of the Atlantic between 1750 and 1850 to tear down old hierarchies and build up new ones, in the process helping the young United States become a democracy reserved for the benefit of white men. With examples including rebellious colonists’ proud adoption of “Yankee Doodle” as their anthem—the song was initially sung by British troops, to make fun of supposedly unsophisticated locals—and the emergence of blackface minstrelsy, Zelnik shows how white settlers used playfulness and humor to position themselves as the rightful owners of the land, to the exclusion not only of foppish Brits but also of Indigenous and Black Americans.

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My Darling Boy, by John Dufresne (Norton). In this novel, a sensitive portrait of parenthood, a divorced, retired newspaperman named Olney, now working part time at a miniature-golf course in Florida, embarks on a quest to save his son from opioid addiction. Along the way, he encounters a host of Florida-gothic figures, both comic and tragic, including a reverend with a cable-access show and blind octogenarian twins. His relationships with these peculiar characters contribute to the novel’s emotional power, even as the devoted Olney finds little respite or reason for hope: “He thinks of all the people who have come and gone in his life, and how once they start going, they don’t stop.”

Too Soon, by Betty Shamieh (Avid Reader). This début comic novel, by an accomplished playwright, stitches together the lives of three generations of Palestinian women as they search for personal freedom. Spanning six decades and told from alternating points of view, the story follows Zoya, who flees a besieged Jaffa for the U.S. in the nineteen-forties; her daughter, Naya, and her experience as the child of refugees in the seventies; and Naya’s irreverent daughter Arabella, who, in Palestine in the twenty-tens, endeavors to direct a gender-reversed production of “Hamlet.” As Shamieh balances her characters’ painful family history and their boisterously funny voices, the women navigate between the “push to be modern, radical, and free” and the “pull to find comfort in a community and identity” born of tradition.