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Homebodies: A Novel Kindle Edition

3.9 3.9 out of 5 stars 171 ratings

"[A] sharp, charming and passionate debut." New York Times Book Review

A Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by Elle, USA Today, Bustle, Ebony, Harper’s Bazaar, PopSugar, New York Post, The Skimm, and The Millions.

A Best Book of 2023 by Marie Claire, Esquire, Vogue, them, Autostraddle, Betches, Gay Times,and Cosmopolitan.

An insightful, propulsive, and deeply sexy debut novel about a young Black writer whose world is turned upside down when she loses her coveted job in media and pens a searing manifesto about racism in the industry.

Mickey Hayward dreams of writing stories that matter, but, for now, her days are filled with listicles about lip gloss and click-bait articles about celebrity haircare. Still, the job is flashy and her girlfriend is steady and supportive. The path may be long, but Mickey’s well on her way, and it’s far from the messy life she left behind in Maryland. Everything finally seems to be falling into place—until she finds out she’s being replaced.

Distraught and enraged, Mickey fires back with a detailed letter outlining the racism she’s endured as a Black woman in media, certain it will change the world for the better. But when her letter is met with overwhelming silence, even from her usually-encouraging girlfriend, Mickey is sent into a tailspin of self-doubt. Forced to reckon with just how fragile her life is, she flees to the last place she ever dreamed she would run: her hometown.

Back home, Mickey is seduced by the simplicity of her hometown—and the flirtation of a former flame—but she soon learns that you can’t outrun your past. In the newfound quiet, she is forced to reflect on the sacrifices she’d made for an industry that never loved her back and pick up the pieces of the life she thought she’d left behind for good. After all, when the walls of success you’ve carefully built around yourself come crumbling down, what—and who—are you left with?

A meditation on identity, self-worth and the toll of corporate racism, Homebodies is a portrait of modern Black womanhood with a protagonist you won’t soon forget.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"I saw so much of myself in Homebodies, and in Mickey’s utterly delicious and sometimes aching story. Mickey made me look back and love my young Black woman self, and I loved her so much for returning me to that place.”  — Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, New York Times bestselling author of The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois

Homebodies is a modern marvel—Tembe Denton-Hurst’s prose is both intimate and hysterical, inflammatory and elegiac. You’ll root for Mickey as she takes on the world, questioning and searching its contours, weaving a story we can’t help but find our own worlds inside of. Denton-Hurst has written a warm, brilliant novel that’s stunning and poignant; Homebodies is wonderfully witty and full of empathy and entirely original.” — Bryan Washington, award-winning author of Memorial and Lot

Homebodies is a beautiful story on becoming. Denton-Hurst’s prose is perfect with an innate attention to detail and astonishing ability to capture the shapes and colors of emotions as she brilliantly illuminates the growing pains of forging one’s own path…something which so many of us are still looking to do. This is a deeply felt, assured literary debut by a writer worth watching.”  — Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of award-winning novels Here Comes the Sun and Patsy

Homebodies is a sharp and tender exploration of what it takes to make a place for yourself in a world that has not. Denton-Hurst deftly navigates the line between a knowing despair and an openhearted hope, contrasting the challenges Mickey faces from employers, lovers, and relatives who can’t always see or name her value with the strength she draws from learning to see herself and the love that has always been available to her. A captivating and illuminating debut.” — Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections

"This novel just gets it right. Maybe it’s vivid storytelling or the intersectional approach to queerness, but this novel speaks to queer people of color who often feel isolated, stretched between two communities. Tembe Denton-Hurst balances a critique on white feminism through the lenses of a young, unapologetically Black, queer writer who’s searching for her identity outside the bounds of her career, family, and long-term relationship." — Cosmopolitan

“Denton-Hurst dazzles with her stirring indictment of racism in media and its insidious effects on Mickey. . . . Emotionally and politically resonant, this is not to be missed.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Sharp and heartfelt and keenly observed—I devoured this book.” — Katie Cotugno, New York Times Bestselling author of Birds of California

"Tembe Denton-Hurst's debut novel astutely captures what it's like to fight for yourself in a world that's stacked against you." — Harper's Bazaar

“In her sharp, charming and passionate debut, 'Homebodies,' Tembe Denton-Hurst showcases an eye for the details that matter. . . . It is this eye for the rhythms and textures of life — of millennial digital media, of the death by a thousand cuts offered by workplace racism, of Maryland suburbia — that makes this novel vivid and inviting.” — New York Times Book Review

"Excellent . . . we devoured it.”  — The Skimm

"Homebodies is crackling with wit and compulsively readable, but it’s also an in-depth examination of the crushing reality that many workers in so-called 'dream jobs' . . . are ultimately expendable to the institutions they devote themselves to." — Vogue

“[A] searing coming-of-age story. . . . Consider it one of the year’s must-reads.” — Porter 

"While stories about young women working in the high-pressure media industry have always fascinated, few are told from the perspective of Homebodies. . . . Denton-Hurst deftly crafts a story of ambition, identity and love." — W Magazine

“Denton-Hurst's poignant and captivating debut is on its way to becoming one of summer's ‘it’ books.” — Scary Mommy

"Tembe Denton-Hurst’s masterful command of the narrative—classical in its shape, contemporary in its textures—makes this sparkling story shine all the more." — Esquire

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

About the Author

Tembe Denton-Hurst(known on the internet as @tembae) is a book-obsessed beauty and culture writer and author. Currently, she works as a staff writer at New York magazine’s The Strategist, where she covers beauty, lifestyle, and books. When she’s not writing, Tembe can be found on her couch in Queens, where she lives with her partner and their two cats, Stella and Dakota. Homebodies is her debut novel.

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0BDDG1T2G
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper (May 2, 2023)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 2, 2023
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 2738 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 316 pages
  • Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0063274280
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.9 3.9 out of 5 stars 171 ratings

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Customer reviews

3.9 out of 5 stars
3.9 out of 5
171 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on May 18, 2023
I’m SUCH A FAN OF HOMEBODIES! I absolutely adored this book. Mickey, a beauty writer for a flashy NYC digital publication, “had an innate talent for knowing how to read a room and a good handle on the mechanics of politics and privilege, which made her perpetually angry, weary, and jaded, always simmering at a low boil.” But then she’s fired and replaced with another Black woman, someone she sees as “more coachable,” who fits in with the company culture better (read: white culture). Mickey spirals, gets into a fight with her longtime perfect partner Lex, and leaves the city for a while, home to suburban Maryland, but not before firing off a manifesto on twitter enumerating the trials, tribulations, total exhaustion Black women go through while working in media. The passionate missive, however, gets exactly 0 likes and Mickey spirals into her own irrelevancy.

Mickey being home, to me, was the most beautiful part of Denton-Hurst’s novel. Mickey runs into ex-girlfriend Tee (OMG I am such a Tee fan!!! Love this character! Can we get a novel about Tee next please?), starts a thing, but it’s the entire cast of characters that makes this book so wonderful. Found families, Mickey’s grandmother, high school bestie Jasmine, rockstar PR pal Scottie—it shows the importance of community, of having people who are willing to hold a space open for you and let you be you, let you run away and take a break.

This book isn’t about Mickey choosing Tee or Lex, though like life that’s part of it, it’s about Mickey being heard and stepping into her own and I won’t say more than that because you’re going to burn through the last third of this novel like the pages are on fire because they absolutely are!
4 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on March 20, 2024
I really liked how this book was written as a true character study. The narrative arch hooks you in but it’s Mickey who keeps you there. I think any WOC who’s worked in corporate settings will be excited at the idea of a well worded revenge tweet paying off. But in Mickey I saw something familiar. you’re not alone or an alien because corporate America has hurt you and changed you and made you question who you are ,only to have your worst nightmare happen…All that work and then you’re asked to leave. It’s insane but it’s so human and that’s what make Mickey so compelling to me. We get to see the effects of having to return home after years of staying miserable so you didn’t have to come home to do that. And we are allured like Mickey by the familiarity but also so scared that she will be trapped. But life isn’t only two choices and I think that homebodies ends on a note where someone has sat back and looked at themselves, miseried over old mistakes and then made new ones that will have to be dealt with, but outside of her job she finally got to make her own mistakes and her own joys and she allows herself to grow closer to people in her family after years of work making avoiding that easier. In the end my thoughts lead me to asking myself if I spend too much time thinking small things are mistakes and analyzing how to never do that again and thus avoiding the big mistakes I may need to make to be where I want to go.
Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2024
Going through my own personal things I didn’t have the room to read this very well written novel about our female main character’s struggles. The characters are real as are the life instances and I found myself wanting more of the story at every turn but it took me quite a while to get fully invested. My investment didn’t pay off as the book wrapped up at seemingly the climax of the tale only to end right before she takes the stage.
Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2023
Ive been enjoying this book !
Reviewed in the United States on February 17, 2024
I'm thoroughly fascinated by this well-written book!! Fiction? Yes, but oh so real!!! And so New York !! I felt right at home in my hometown, in that book -- I especially found the part where Mickey sees a man drop something at Union Station (Wash DC) and makes a wry mental comment on the speed at which he picked it up - been there, seen it.
I "read' some of my own relationship struggles into "Homebodies" and frankly I wish I had been as focused as Mickey was. The dinner fraught with stress from Elda, and second-guessing along with unexpected surprises was well-wrought, with emotions flaring up and down through the narrative in this chapter.
One-- no Two -- personal observations... Page 118 - all the trees she could see from the AMTRAK platform at Wilmington -- nuh uh.. most of them don't exist. I commuted back and forth for decades, from DC and NY - to WIlmington DE -- and the buildings definitely more than out-number any of the skimpy trees. Then page 119 -- why did she get off at Union Station DC, and then go to New Carrollton MD, when she could have left the train at the nice big station at New Carrolton-- long before it ends its route at Washington DC? But anyway , most people will not know about this and so I can easily dismiss it . "Homebodies" is a beautiful trip in itself -- with rolling, roiling emotions and personal struggles, laced with love and great food.
Reviewed in the United States on November 12, 2023
I really wanted to like this book, however something kept me from fully connecting. I don’t know if it was the constant jumping from past to present within a chapter, the drawn out storyline as sometimes it was quite slow, or if it was because the main character was, for lack of a better word, annoying. Homebodies had great potential, but it simply wasn’t my cup of tea. With that being said, I’d still read something else by the author.
One person found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on May 26, 2023
Mickey is a young adult who doesn’t cope well with losing her job. She wallows in self-pity, gets defensive and sabotages her relationship with her partner, Lex. The book is somewhat claustrophobic with much of it occurring in Mickey’s small personal space, with her in sweatpants and looking at her phone. Not a lot happens here and much of the time I felt like I was watching the kettle, waiting for the water to boil. It never did, or at least not by the half way point, which is when I gave up on it. The writing is fine, which is why I didn’t give the book a 1 star rating.
I was provided with an ARC (thanks to the author & publisher!) and I am voluntarily posting my honest review.

Top reviews from other countries

chris3158
2.0 out of 5 stars Boring moaning and misery... DNF
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 4, 2023
I am sorry to say this for a debut novel but I really couldn't get into this book at all. I struggled through to the 15% mark but just wasn't enjoying it. Indeed, I almost had to force myself to read on further in the hope that it would live up to some of the other reviews. Maybe if I had gone on further, it would have done, but I just couldn't make myself labour on and on through the tedious misery.
Ray
1.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 17, 2024
I got this book because it had good ratings but I was really disappointed. I guess the style wasn't for me.
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