fiction, and her writing appears or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, No Tokens, The Brooklyn Review, and elsewhere.
Greenwich is her first novel.
At Electric Lit Broad tagged eight "novels about class and racial tensions in the American suburbs, each of them engrossing and unsettling, concerned with the powerful forces that shape a community. These are books about belonging, about insiders and outsiders, that ask how far we’ll go and how much we’ll risk in pursuit of the good life."
One title on the list:
Our Best Intentions by Vibhuti JainRead about another novel on the list.
High school sophomore Angela Singh is just trying to fit in with her Westchester classmates when she stumbles across a popular white boy bleedingon the football field with a knife in his abdomen. He accuses a Black girl, Chiara Thompson, of stabbing him, and while Angela isn’t sure that she believes him, she did see Chiara nearby. Chiara and Angela, who is Indian, are among the few students of color at the school, and Angela is caught between the mounting outrage of the powerful white community and her sense that something about the stabbing doesn’t line up. This portrayal of class, race, and belonging in Kitchawan, New York is heartbreaking and insightful, and a scene in which Angela tries to apologize to Chiara’s cousin has lingered with me years after reading.
Q&A with Vibhuti Jain.
The Page 69 Test: Our Best Intentions.
--Marshal Zeringue
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