Publisher
Riverhead Books
Jane has high hopes her life is about to turn around. After years of living precariously, she, her painter husband Lenny, and their two kids have landed a stint as house sitters in a friend’s luxurious home high in the hills above Los Angeles, a gig that coincides magically with Jane’s sabbatical. If she can just finish her latest novel, Nusu Nusu—the centuries-spanning epic Lenny refers to as her ‘mulatto War and Peace‘—she’ll have tenure and some semblance of stability and success within her grasp. But things don’t work out quite as hoped. In search of a plan B, like countless writers before her Jane turns her desperate gaze to Hollywood. When she finagles a meeting with a warm youthful producer with a seven-figure deal to create ‘diverse content’ for a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a ‘real writer’ to create what he envisions as the greatest biracial comedy ever to hit the compact screen. Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.
What The Reviewers Say
Feels more like a summer blockbuster … Funny, foxy and fleet; it’s aspirational about money and luxury items and mocking of those aspirations. There are times, especially near the end, when you might wish Senna pushed deeper into the themes and the pain she lays bare, but the jokes are good, the punches land, the dialogue is tart … The characters in Colored Television are wonderful talkers; they’re wits and improvisers who clock the absurdities of the human condition … In the end, Senna delivers a mostly inspired, and mostly joyful, series of narrative double axels that will make you reconsider who the true sellouts are.
Well-oiled, precisely choreographed … Senna has a flair for sketching her characters with a kind of bulky minimalism: Snippets of backstory and an array of ticks and quips deliver an unexpectedly fully realized person … Here to tell us that deciding on some tidy fresh biracial identity to replace the stereotypical tragic mulatto is a farcical, futile exercise.
Writes with compassion for a heroine who is searching for her racial and social identities. In the end, Senna allows Jane the success her struggles have earned for her. Readers will be grateful for that.
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