Great Black Hope

by Rob Franklin

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

“Cool and concise; a talent to watch.” —Jay McInerney author of Bright Lights, Big City

“You’re going to get papercuts, you’re going to turn the pages so fast.” —Brad Thor, Today

A gripping debut from an electrifying new voice about an upwardly mobile and downwardly spiraling Black man caught between worlds of race and class, glamourous parties and sudden consequences, a friend’s mysterious death and his own arrest.

An arrest for cocaine possession on the last day of a sweltering New York summer leaves Smith, a queer Black Stanford graduate, in a state of turmoil. Pulled into the court system and mandated treatment, he finds himself in an absurd but dangerous his class protects him, but his race does not.

It’s just weeks after the death of his beloved roommate Elle, the daughter of a famous soul singer, and he’s still reeling from the tabloid spectacle—as well as lingering questions around how well he really knew his closest friend. He flees to his hometown of Atlanta, only to buckle under the weight of expectations from his family of doctors and lawyers and their history in America. But when Smith returns to New York, it’s not long before he begins to lose himself to his old life—drawn back into the city’s underworld, where his search for answers may end up costing him his freedom and his future.

Smith goes on a dizzying journey through the nightlife circuit, anonymous recovery rooms, Atlanta’s Black society set, police investigations and courtroom dramas, and a circle of friends coming of age in a new era. Great Black Hope is a propulsive, glittering story about what it means to exist between worlds, to be upwardly mobile yet spiraling downward, and how to find a way back to hope.

Genres: Fiction, LGBT, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Queer, Race, Audiobook

320 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 10, 2025

About the author

Born and raised in Atlanta, Rob Franklin is a writer of fiction and poetry, and a cofounder of Art for Black Lives. A Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and finalist for the New England Review Emerging Writer Award, he has published work in New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Rumpus among others. Franklin lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches writing at the School of Visual Arts. Great Black Hope is his first novel.

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book contained some interesting themes and musings related to how class and race intersect. Our protagonist Smith, a young queer Black man living in New York City, often feels trapped or restless amidst the forward movement of the elite class. He often copes with substances, which lands him in the predicament that opens the novel.

Despite this novel’s intriguing themes, I found the execution lacking. Smith’s point of view felt highly intellectualized and distant. The prose was at times aimless. And I was a bit fatigued reading yet another book in which a queer man of color engages in self-destructive sexual and romantic relationships with white men at the exclusion of fellow men of color – I feel that that trope/pattern is already well or even over-represented in queer lit (even if maybe at the end of this book Smith exhibited some small growth with the character O).

[August Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let's stop right here and call it now. Book of the year 2025. I've been fortunate to read this novel in different iterations over the last couple years--Franklin is simply a marvel. Astute, poignant, funny, charming and gorgeous while unafraid of tackling things that most writers are too afraid to even mention. This doesn't read like a debut, it reads like the start of a brilliant and legendary career.

[Gabriella · Rating 2 out of 5]

Actual Rating: 2.5 stars (in retrospect, might be an actual 2, because I've jokingly referred to this book as "Great Black NOPE" more times than I can count now. I also attended a local book club meeting that was reading this, JUST to express my hate to a larger audience.)
While I cannot say that Rob Franklin met *my* great black hopes, I’m walking away from his debut more pleased than I thought I’d be at the halfway mark. Great Black Hope is an ambitious, memorable piece of work—I can completely see why a certain sort of reader is eating this up. For me, though, this book stumbled in many places.

🎓👎🏾The college reunion I never wanted
This is a very niche comment, but Smith reminded me of this Twitter account (@cummunism) that half my city wants to see burned at the stake! For those who are not chronically online, I’m talking about the sort of people who take having spent their twenties in New York way too seriously, and think the rest of us are just dying to hear about their days as a “bicoastal socialite transplant” or whatever. I went to undergrad with these sorts of people, but did not befriend many of them. So essentially, this book was a 6-year reunion I didn't ask for.

I just feel like Franklin constantly chose the most obnoxious way possible to say things, to where there was no way to not have him come across as an asshole. Like babe, 98% of your readers didn’t go to Yale…YOU didn’t go to Yale. Why are you calling something “Whiffenpoofian” and making me look up a random acapella group for a college I have nothing to do with? Like we GET IT, you’re pretentious for sport!!! In Franklin’s defense, I felt like the grating narrative voice calmed down by the end. I couldn’t tell if that’s because I’d learned to filter out more of the drivel, or because the final third was the place where he actually settled into the story and stopped trying to “wow” us with pithy listicles.

👩🏾‍🌾❌ Some people shouldn’t write about the South
People keep saying this is a book about “the Black elite”, due to the section of this book set in the author and protagonist’s hometown of Atlanta. The issue is that our protagonist is currently a member of the White coastal elite, who just so happens to be Black. In other words, I’m trying to say that Smith doesn’t spend enough time with the Black elite to have anything new to say about them. This isn’t a criticism—many queer adults don’t run in the same circles our parents chose for us in childhood. But when that’s the case, maybe those queer people shouldn’t situate a third of their autofiction novel in a setting that they primarily engage through holiday trips, childhood memories, and family lore. 🙃

Speaking of family lore: the Down South section has such a jarring intro that all readers who are THOUGHTFUL family historians are entitled to compensation!!!! 🤬 In a truly unnecessary attempt to chronicle the protagonist’s family history in the “snarling South” (156), we open a heretofore party novel with a LYNCHING of Smith’s grandma’s cousin—the grandma who, mind you, is barely even mentioned outside of a single scene in the story. With literally no warning, this jump scare of an opener moves on to the grandma’s legal career during the crack epidemic (why are you saying that Len Bias looked like he could’ve been this lady’s son?!? Are you Obama in 2013?!?!), before finally confirming WHO this woman even is in relation to the boy we’ll spend the rest of this story with.

After all this, I was literally 2 seconds away from my second DNF of the year. I wanted to tell the author to PLEASE go back to writing about white girls getting wasted, because this other shit is ABYSMAL. Even as we leave the terrible grandma prequel and enter present-day Atlanta, it doesn’t get much better. The in-pulpit jokes make no sense. He makes the entire city sound like a zoo, and not in a good way. I just got the sense that this was an understudied setting that the author took for granted—that Atlanta hadn’t changed since he left it in 2009, and that people down South don’t have a sort of specificity that matches the bohemians of his current social circle. You can tell this by his unimaginative descriptions and overreliance on stereotypes. In at least 4 different instances in this section, Franklin uses Greek affiliation as a stand-in for actual characterization, not realizing that for each sorority or frat, there are several subtypes of members that you could be referencing. I wouldn’t mind it at all as a starting point, but there’s no follow-up—because the Atlanta characters are shells compared to the New York characters. This is just not the depth I’d expect from what everybody is claiming is a “singular and stunning new voice.”

Singular new voice, my ass. 🙄 Last year, I slogged through A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe, a similar attempt to look at “all sides of a city”, particularly Atlanta. Let’s just say that in the 27 years between their publication, Franklin has only managed to be a step less cringey when talking about Atlanta than his predecessor—a white man born in 1930!!!

What I came for: masking, addiction, and the Sisyphean nature of upward mobility
Franklin does eventually get to the part of the blurb that I was excited about, a deep reflection on Black upward mobility. In the past, I’ve called it a myth, but that’s not exactly right. It can be achieved, but in the rare cases that it is on a family-wide basis, we find the illustrious family rolling an endless boulder up the hill, and we find countless other cases of people who were crushed under the weight of these expectations. Franklin’s intriguing Atlanta commentary is about this uphill battle of the strivers. Like, so many of our families haven’t even “really made it” to be able to afford to slip, and yet and still, so many of us ARE slipping. The world is just too hard, even for people raised with certain privileges. This is something my friends and I talk about all the time, and something Smith muses on when he’s thinking about what became of his former Jack and Jill acquaintances. Page 181 has it exactly right: “for those who looked like them, that word was a moral failure, a confirmation of society’s worst fears. A forfeit of all the tenuous advantages given.”

“That word” in the quote above is addiction, one of the truest topics in this story. I’ve seen firsthand how in Black respectable circles, it becomes insensitive or impolite to bring attention to this topic, as if you could simply will away any bad luck that has befallen your family. People spend years treating a chronic disease as a one-time issue, something that can be glossed over in time to send out the Christmas cards. Smith reflects on this constantly, with his own substance use and his friends’. Everywhere he turns, even bell hooks’ All About Love, he finds a seething disdain for people who can’t “pull it together” enough to function in our deeply brutal world. This, coincidentally, is coming up in some other books I’m reading right now, including Love In a Fucked-Up World by Dean Spade and Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum by Antonia Hylton.

Some of the most stunning passages in Great Black Hope have to do with masks, and how well we can know our loved ones in a world that demands we wear them to succeed. These characters are desperately seeking any portal to allow themselves to unmask and achieve vulnerability with each other, whether that’s through enmeshed relationships, photography, or yes—substance use. While Franklin doesn’t reference Black Skin, White Masks by name, Smith’s engagement with the work is clear: he reflects on Fanon’s quote that “The Negro is comparison” throughout this novel. The theme of masking extends to how the experience of addiction is filtered through class, meaning that some people can “mask” themselves in ways that are inaccessible to others, who are more harshly punished for their relationship to substances. I’ve seen this firsthand in my own family, and appreciated how Franklin described it on page 228:

He had, though, hadn’t he, benefited from that shift—addiction recast as a reaper who could enter any home, making crime-tough fogies adjust their timeworn tune. His lawyer had worked to ensure it. Iron your suit, comb your hair, all reminders of a lifelong lesson: that class and its comportment offered a proximity to whiteness that could make you a person in another’s eyes, one deserving of a second chance.

I actually want to keep quoting from that same passage, which is one of my favorite scenes in this book (the only Atlanta scene I liked was the landlord discussion over Christmas dinner.) In this scene, Smith is tagging along with a new group of friends for a harm reduction distro in Tompkins Square. He’s thinking about what it could look like to befriend these people, and how it might serve him to run with a more down-to-earth crowd. After noticing that one of the people in the group is annoyed with him and his naked fascination with the “real New York”, we’re gifted this passage:

Perhaps that was what Tia saw in him, that hideous chimeric thing. She’d taken one look at his natural wine, his Saint Laurent boots, and clocked him as a spineless striver, one willing to dance when told. And so she had known that his presence here was essentially frivolous, the latest in bourgeois amusement. He would use this to feel good, then move on, as had so many others. He could tell, from those same subtle markers of dress and affect, that Mona and O were more of a kind with him. They were here out of fealty, good politics, but not need, not fear that they might someday end up on the other end of a cruel equation. But for Tia, couch to couch and room to room, the slip from that rusted last rung into the endless bottom would be so slight as to be silent. (228-229)

In general, these sorts of reflections are the parts of Great Black Hope I most appreciated. This novel has a lot to say about the life-altering potential of deep friendship, and the many forms of artifice that keep us from connecting with and recognizing each other in these ways. When Rob Franklin is writing about these topics, which he has deeply interrogated, the work is stellar and clear. I just wish we had a version of this book that didn’t also try to include so much he wasn’t clued into.

[Debbie H · Rating 4 out of 5]

4⭐️ The writing in this book is phenomenal! The sights, sounds, smells of NYC are written so well it brings you right into the nightlife!

Davey “Smith” is a young, black, gay, college graduate from a very successful family, that sinks into trouble with a possession arrest and job loss. When his best friend Elle is found dead his life takes a downward spiral he finds it hard to recover from.
The characters of Smith, his friends and family are interesting and well developed. The city of NY is a character itself.

I wish the story of Elle’s murder would have been featured more in the plot. The finding of the killer was very anticlimactic. I think I was expecting more of a mystery/thriller. This book is very character driven and the main focus is Smith’s struggle and journey of downfall and redemption, his family’s expectations and dreams for him. Great debut novel!

Thank you NetGalley and S&S/Summit Books for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

[enzoreads · Rating 4 out of 5]

La moitié du livre était vraiment longue mais ces longueurs sont vite pardonnées par la profondeur des personnages, la beauté de l’histoire, la plume immaculée et par les différents thèmes abordés, tous avec beaucoup de nuances et de vérité

très belle surprise

[Summer · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I saw that Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr! (my top read of 2024), raved about Great Black Hope, I just knew that I would love it!

Kaveh was not wrong. Great Black Hope pulls you in from the start and doesn’t let go until the last page. It’s an emotionally impactful story about grief, class, race, addiction, and identity. But even though the story contains heavier themes, there is plenty of humor to balance the story out.

I loved the queer rep and how the book makes the reader question their own privilege. I also adored the way the author made New York City almost a character in itself. I live for a well written book and I was very impressed with the writing in Great Black Hope, especially since it’s
Rob Franklin’s debut novel.

Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin will be available on June 10. Many thanks to Summit Books for the gifted copy!

[Andre(Read-A-Lot) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Uneven but impressive. Had a great start but slowly and ever so slightly it starting going downhill until midway through you’re kind of like, “whatever.” With that being said, I believe this writer has an abundance of talent, and I’ll be watching to see if he can pull it all together with his next offering.

[zay :) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great Black Hope is less of a traditional novel and more of a deep dive into the messy, glittering, and often brutal realities of being a young, queer Black man in New York City. It’s about Smith—a well-off, well-educated man who, after his friend Elle’s tragic death, finds himself arrested for cocaine possession.

What I liked about this book is how it captures a specific kind of existence—the one where parties, ambition, and self-destruction all exist in the same breath. Franklin examines the intersection of race and class with precision, showing how some people are cushioned from their mistakes while others face harsher consequences. The novel captures the glitz and chaos of New York’s nightlife, evoking the energy of past generations’ party scenes while offering a more modern, introspective take on privilege and consequence.

That said, I didn’t completely connect with the book the way I’d hoped. The pacing is slow, and since the story is more focused on character and vibe than a strong narrative, there were moments where it felt a little aimless. I also found myself wanting to get deeper into Smith’s emotions- he’s a compelling character, but at times, I felt like I was watching his life unfold from a distance rather than really being in it with him.

If you’re looking for a fast-moving plot, this might not be for you. Great Black Hope is more about mood than mystery, more about Smith’s internal conflicts than high-stakes drama. It lingers. It makes you think. It makes you wonder how much of your identity is shaped by the spaces you occupy.

[Jillian B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Smith is just another upper-class guy doing lines of cocaine at the Hamptons club. The trouble is, unlike his fellow privileged party animals, he is Black. So when cops appear, he’s the one who gets arrested and charged. He’s left wondering if he’ll be protected by his wealth, or doomed by his race, as his court date nears. Meanwhile, he’s grieving the recent loss of his best friend to an overdose, and watching his other best friend struggle to stay sober.

This was a fascinating book that grapples with respectability politics and the intersection of class and race. It also explores the murky grey area between “normal” substance use and addiction, especially among wealthy socialites. At what point does partying turn into a problem? We see a wide spectrum of recovery experiences as Smith attends a somewhat scammy support group in an effort to look good in front of the judge. This book also really captures the hurry-up-and-wait nature of bureaucratic legal processes in a high-stakes scenario. I found myself getting so nervous for Smith as his court date approached!

I look forward to checking out more from this author. His prose is gorgeous and full of sensory details. I haven’t felt this immersed in a richly sketched world of wealthy Manhattanites since I was a teen reading Gossip Girl!

[Tell · Rating 4 out of 5]

And what costume shall the poor girl wear / To all tomorrow's parties?

Astounding. This book has gotten a big push, but it's well deserved- the writing is sumptuous, lived-in, and pulsing with observational bon mots. Rob Franklin is a talented chronicler of the way joy can turn to rot, how parties can become haunted, and how the promise of success isn't always borne out.

The story of Smith, a queer Black man with intimate connections to nightlife and the NYC glitterati, and his journey into the underbelly of the court system after he's caught with cocaine in the Hamptons, I loved how the queerness and Blackness of the novel was irrefutable: you can only observe as much as Smith does when you're on the outside.

My favorite parts of this novel were both the party scenes and the visit to Atlanta: I loved reading about the "Jack and Jill types" of the upwardly mobile Black community. The novel is frank in its discussions about race and desire without being pedantic or didactic, which I appreciated.

I loved this book. Franklin writes beautifully about grief, New York, friendship, and celebrations, and I appreciated the twinned nature of writing about happiness and loss, alongside the knowledge that you can't have one without the other.

[Bobby · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a story about Pork Belly. No, not a book about pork belly, a story. So when visiting a friend in Sweden, who is actually from Arkansas, he made from scratch the most delicious pork belly tacos. It was quite an undertaking as he had to score the pork belly just so, season it right, and then cook it for the right amount of time (hours upon hours). Outcome = one of the best meals of my life*

Fast forward: I had so much fun eating those tacos that months later I decided to have friends over to my parents house and treat them to the same. Folks showed up around 8pm expecting dinner soon thereafter and before you know it the time is 11:45pm, I am three sheets absolutely being battered by the wind, and I can’t get this damn pork belly to cook right. The top and bottom were crispy and delicious, but the interior remained undercooked.

And while this book is in no way a total failure like that night was, I mention it because the first and last 1/4s of this book are good to great, but I couldn’t connect with the middle half. Not all books are written to be universally understood however, and I know there are lots of people who will enjoy the entire novel.

Positives: for a debut novel the prose was excellent. Mr. Franklin is an author that is able to connect with the younger generations, of which he is a member, and I expect him to be a force in literature moving forward. There were several times while reading that I found myself smiling at the specific language used because it’s how I would talk to my friends. That aspect of the book was dope and when an author connects that way it feels like a little spark of magic for me when reading.

3.5 stars

* I may have been hitting a w!$d pen relentlessly just before this meal so had to include the asterisk.

My Pork Belly Taco Recipe Below:

Just kidding!

[Danna · Rating 2 out of 5]

The premise of Great Black Hope was intriguing to me, but the execution was not. This is a slow read that doesn’t follow a typical story arc and it didn’t work for me. The writing is flowery, often using long and gorgeous descriptions that don’t actually say much and, at least for me, made the intention harder to follow. I am sure other readers will be taken with Dave Smith’s plight, but I was so lost and bored by the writing that the social dilemma lost its power.

Not recommended. Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[thee.millennialreader · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a challenge to get into. I found myself needing to rely on immersive reading — just to stay grounded in the story. The author’s descriptions were incredibly rich and deeply creative, especially in how the main character viewed the world. But at times, that depth became overwhelming and hard to follow. It felt like the narrative drifted into a poetic stream of consciousness, which made it easy to get lost.

I really wanted to like this. There were moments where I caught the deeper meaning and appreciated the emotional weight behind the words. But just as often, I felt like the story jumped around too much, and I had to refocus just to figure out what was happening. It wasn’t a terrible read by any means—but it might just be that this author’s style isn’t for me.

Thank you NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the ARC of this book. 📖

[chasc.taylor_reads · Rating 1 out of 5]

The premise was compelling, but the execution didn’t live up to its promise. Written in third person, the main character felt distant and hard to connect with. The prose is elegant, flowery, and richly descriptive—clearly the focus here was on the writing rather than the story or emotional depth.

Despite tackling heavy themes like addiction, queerness, and murder, the novel somehow felt emotionally flat. It explores a lot, but none of the plot points are developed in a meaningful or satisfying way. In the end, it felt like a beautifully dressed nothing burger.

I’m genuinely disappointed—I really thought this would be one I’d love.

[Brandice · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great Black Hope is Rob Franklin’s debut novel — A story about David Smith, a gay Black man in his 20s, arrested for cocaine possession in the Hamptons at the end of summer. In the following months, Smith dutifully checks action items off a list in the hopes it will show good faith and help remove the record of one poor choice.

As Smith complies with these tasks, he is also enduring grief from the loss of his close friend Elle, for whom an investigation is still ongoing. He heads home to Atlanta for a temporary reprieve before returning to NYC.

Race, class, addiction, and friendship are themes of Great Black Hope. I enjoyed aspects of the story though it was also very intellectual. I like smart writing and literary fiction, but felt more than once while reading this, sentences packed in more than was necessary.

Great Black Hope engaged me early on, then faded in the middle, but I appreciated some resolutions provided by the end. I would read more from Franklin in the future — 3.5 stars

[♥ Sandi ❣ · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 stars

I am just not the right target for this book. It is about a young raunchy queer black kid that just can't stay out of the drug scene. Recommended to me, but it held no interest for me - wrong demographic.

[Brenda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sadly I just couldn’t relate to this style of writing. The author tries to embellish his writing craft and had sentences that rambled on with colorful narrative and I found I completely lost the point and had to reread many sentences.

The story was superficial. I couldn’t relate to any of the characters, and most characters so privileged and entitled they were not even likable. This is definitely not a crime thriller but a boring story with creative colorful sentences.

Would not recommend. Many thanks to NetGalley for an ARC of this book.

[Robert · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book really made me feel things. Mainly exhausted and angry.
Smith is a boring, incredibly passive character. His friend dies of an overdose, he gets arrested for drug possession, he gets treated for addiction, he loses his job, and his friend goes missing. And yet, he doesn’t do anything at all. It felt like being driven around in a car with someone you barely know and don’t have anything to talk about.
The overdose? Is handled by the police though about 80% of the way through the book Smith looks at some film to try to help (he doesn’t share this with anyone, and also doesn’t find anything helpful).
The arrest? Easily handled in court with no issues or record.
The addiction treatment? He doesn’t feel like he has a problem and doesn’t interact in group and no one calls him out for it. In reality he doesn’t seem to have too much of a problem, so really a waste of a story line.
Losing his job? Just budget cuts, nothing to do with the addiction or arrest. He doesn’t even really look for a job or change his path.
His friend going missing? This was the one part that was almost interesting, and it happens in about 30 pages at the end. It’s the only time he actively does anything, with the fear that she has overdosed like the friend in the beginning (she doesn’t, she just went to meditate and didn’t have her phone).
This was just a whole lot of nothing. The characters were boring and flavorless, the story incredibly dull and pointless, and the writing made it seem like the author was trying to prove he knew how to use a thesaurus.

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Great Black Hope, Rob Franklin explores what happens to Smith, a young queer Black Stanford graduate living in New York, after he is arrested on cocaine possession at a party on Long Island. Smith has recently lost his close friend Elle, who is found dead in shocking circumstances. The novel is in part a coming of age story, as Smith confronts the role of race and class in his interactions with the courts and mandated treatment. It's also the story of how the mystery surrounding Elle's death consumes him, and the story of a very particular kind of New York life embodied by his friend Carolyn, who pulls Smith along in her wake. And it is the story of his family, highly educated, high achieving Black professionals in Atlanta, and their high expectations for Smith. Beautifully written, readable, funny, and heartbreaking by turns. I cannot wait to see what else Rob Franklin writes in the future.

[Kevwe Okumakube · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every single person who interacted with me at least once this year has heard me rave and rave AND rave about this book. I wish I could go back to my first reading, because it was a magical experience. And it still remains so, every time I pick it up. PLEASE read this book so I can have someone else to rave about it to.

[Jason Laipply · Rating 3 out of 5]

Curses (again) to Goodreads for not having half stars available in their rating system, causing me to rate this three stars rounding down from the three and half stars I’d truly give it.

Overall, I found this a worthy debut novel from the author, with several glimpses of the author’s talent for the written word, from gorgeous turns of phrase to subtle observations on aspects of the experience of being human, gay, black, young, a city club kid and countless other things.

I did find my attention wandering about so thirds of the way through the book once the setting had shifted back to New York after the break in Atlanta. I felt as if the author had somehow lost the focus and clear vision for what they wanted to communicate and what the narrative truly was…it felt as if they floundered a bit with some editing, and the snappy drive that was present in the rest of the book eroded a bit.

But that notwithstanding, I found it a worthy read and hopefully a promising first effort from a new author.

[K]

What this book lacked in its sometimes unfocused plot, it made up for in its beautiful prose. Some gorgeous lines in here, the author has such a rich vocabulary. Excited to read more by him. Thank you NetGalley.

[Emily Stepper · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've become a terrible fiction reader, with an extremely short attention span. I couldn't remember who any of the characters were, if we'd met them before, how they fit into the plot... wanted to love it, but didn't really get it.

[Derrick Contreras · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very strong debut with excellent writing that pushes back against your typical novel. Our main character Smith is arrested on cocaine possession after the death of his friend and roommate Elle. The book follows Smith as he observes as a wallflower, taking in the varied hierarchies and privileges in educational, legal, party… etc spaces. There’s the looming decision of how Smith’s case will be handled as well as the unknown surrounding Elle’s death. But mostly this book serves to ask many questions about privilege both between and within race and gender while setting it against the backdrop of a New York party scene. It’s a great jumping off point for discussions and less of an immersive plot focused book. I’m definitely eager for other people to read it so I can talk about a lot of the different situations brought up. I do think there were one too many storylines to follow though and could have cut some parts and expanded on the rest. Thank you to the publisher for the gifted ARC.

[Daja]

This was a DNF book for me. I had high hopes for this book. The plot is what caught my attention however this book was not what I expected. This a very slow read and has a style of writing that I just could not get into. In my opinion there is a lot of unnecessary descriptions.

[Will · Rating 3 out of 5]

A debut from a queer, Black author & I’m totally here for that… but this book did not capture me like I thought it would. I loved the descriptions of NY nightlife in the first half of the book, yassified versions of characters that could come straight off an episode of Gossip Girl, witty & relatable banter between the fabulous friends & the writing flowed so easily that it made reading the book feel like easily digestible poetry. The plot is where I personally felt there was a big setback, the closer I got to the end, I could tell the ending wasn’t gonna surprise me or even move me like the words did. Appreciate all of the relatable content about coming of age as a queer black twentysomething with substance addiction tendencies but this book left me wanting more.

[soph · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thank you to the publisher for the advance proof copy.
Unfortunately this book did not invoke the depth of emotions that I feel it was supposed to for me. In fact, I felt that the characters (and hence myself as a reader) were indicating only indifference, which felt so unnatural for a book which is supposed to focus on emotional themes such as addiction, friendship, grief and race. It was very slow paced which would have been fine if it examined the themes in further depth or to further effect. There wasn’t any poor writing but it did not move me, and that is a huge part of my enjoyment of books.

[Jessica K. · Rating 3 out of 5]

If I had only two words to describe this book they’d be “boring” and “pretentious.” The writing is beautifully, artistically crafted and meticulous - fancy academic ways of being “boring” and “pretentious.” While there are many important themes in the book that make it hard to feel comfortable judging it - the impact of privilege, the way the appropriation of black bodies in news, social, and pop culture media serves to dehumanize them as much as the purported basis to conduct that appropriation does, the pressures laden upon successful Black men and women emblematized as “success stories” - those themes are largely “boring” and “pretentious,” particularly when embedded in an autofictional love letter to the upper middle class, well-educated elite youth of NYC (again, a topic both “boring” and “pretentious”, particularly when littered with such frequent location name-drops). There were certainly moments of this book that had value, but can you really say you like a book when you spend the last 80% of it anxious for it to be over?

[Mary McBride · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very impressive debut novel about a young black man struggling for his identity-
Surrounded by the privileged white, but observant of his race, he turns to addiction.
This is a great commentary on the expectations and success of blacks vs whites.
Stellar writing.
Looking forward to what comes next from this talented young author.

[Gonçalo · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing here is extraordinary. The emotion, the vice, the fear Smith conveys, through a lively and pulsating NYC, make this book what it is.

There is clear personal experience by the author, and Great Black Hope squeezes every drop of that experience.

Unfortunately, such compelling characters (main characters and the city itself) lack a strong plot to make use of such brilliant writing. It is interesting, it just is not up to the standards this writing deserves.