This brief encounter reveals that LOTE’s first-person narrator is Black in a white dominated space, something she seems used to, as she deftly deals with the power-drunk door boy “James.” We also learn that Mathilda is wearing “eBay lab diamonds, silver leatherette and lead velvets,” an almost-synesthetic description that places us post-Internet while leaving much to the imagination. Should you answer the call to research, you may find yourself becoming a version of the novel’s protagonist, Mathilda Adaramola, whose name the reader learns on the book’s second page when an “incensed blond twink” tries to stop her from entering the London archive she is volunteering in. LOTE is rich, in the non-sarcastic sense: Layered and ornate, the text is a luxury to re-read, tie-ing in, as it does, and so leading out, if you’re curious, into a vast world of research and observation, complementing specialized histories with contemporary realities dressed in clever analogies. Some of them-Josephine Baker, Virginia Woolf-may be recognizable, others-Ardizzoni, Sarah Montmorency, Luisa Casati, John Garreaux-may be less so, because they are fictional or niche-historic. Shola von Reinhold’s debut novel LOTE is decorated with names as iconic as the author’s own.
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