Notes on Her Colour (Jennifer Neal, Vintage)

Gabrielle has inherited the gift of being able to change the colour of her skin from her mother Tallulah, and her mother before her. Yet Gabrielle grows up in a household thrumming with a ‘monophonic melody of violence’ subject to the caprices of her tyrannical father Robert, ‘a six-foot-ten scowl’, and her loving yet deeply unwell mother, ‘the law that governed the miniature cosmos on our street’. Gabrielle and Tallulah share a sacred bond that scaffolds them against the worst of Robert’s behaviour, but it’s one that’s irrevocably shattered when Tallulah suffers a cataclysmic mental health episode. For all the magical, surreal elements that enchant Notes on Her Colour, it’s a novel about very real things—surviving as a Black Indigenous person in a white supremacist world, withstanding the careless cruelty of teenagers and high school, finding oneself through music and love. It’s suffused with a richness of detail and feeling—Gabrielle perceives the world through the undulations and timbres of people’s voices, and the imperceptible changes in their hues that only she is privy to. The Florida that American-Australian author Jennifer Neal brings to life in her book, thick with humidity and vulnerable to catastrophic weather events—where ‘survival is a season’—is the evocative backdrop to this story of trauma, grief, queer love and transcendent joy. Notes on Her Colour will appeal to readers of Mohsin Hamid, Julie Koh and Karen Wyld.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Sonia Nair is a Melbourne-based writer and critic. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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Category: Reviews