In this "dangerously hilarious" novel (Los Angeles Times), a trans woman reenters life on the outside after more than twenty years in a men's prison, over one consequential Fourth of July weekend—from the author of the PEN/Faulkner Award winner Delicious Foods.
Carlotta Mercedes has been misunderstood her entire life. When she was pulled into a robbery gone wrong, she still went by the name she'd grown up with in Fort Greene, Brooklyn—before it gentrified. But not long after her conviction, she took the name Carlotta and began to live as a woman, an embrace of selfhood that prison authorities rejected, keeping Carlotta trapped in an all-male cell block, abused by both inmates and guards, and often placed in solitary.
In her fifth appearance before the parole board, Carlotta is at last granted conditional freedom and returns to a much-changed New York City. Over a whirlwind Fourth of July weekend, she struggles to reconcile with the son she left behind, to reunite with a family reluctant to accept her true identity, and to avoid any minor parole infraction that might get her consigned back to lockup.
Written with the same astonishing verve of Delicious Foods, which dazzled critics and readers alike, Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta sweeps the reader through seemingly every street of Brooklyn, much as Joyce's Ulysses does through Dublin. The novel sings with brio and ambition, delivering a fantastically entertaining read and a cast of unforgettable characters even as it challenges us to confront the glaring injustices of a prison system that continues to punish people long after their time has been served.
1 of 1 copy available
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
August 30, 2022 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781668605219
- File size: 268373 KB
- Duration: 09:19:06
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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January 1, 2022
International award winner Cercas expands to literary suspense inEven the Darkest Night, featuring a young ex-con who read Les Mis�rables in jail and after the murder of his sex-worker mother joins the Barcelona police and is sent to investigate a particularly brutal double murder outside the city. In another genre blender, the New York Times best-selling Crosley purveys humor, psychological twistiness, and strong writing to create what could be a Cult Classic featuring a woman who leaves a work dinner to buy cigarettes and encounters a string of ghostly ex-boyfriends (100,000-copy first printing). From Dermansky (e.g., the multi-best-booked The Red Car), Hurricane Girl sends 32-year-old Allison Brody from the West Coast to the East Coast, where she buys a small house on the beach and is promptly hit by a Category 3 hurricane that leaves her with a bleeding head and some very confused thoughts. Following Delicious Foods, which boast PEN/Faulkner and Hurston/Wright Legacy honors, Hannaham's Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta features a woman who transitioned in prison and is finally released after more than two decades, returning apprehensively to a New York she barely knows and a family that doesn't understand her (40,000-copy first printing). Winner of the Publishing Triangle's Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, Holleran returns after 13 years with The Kingdom of Sand, whose nameless narrator has survived the death of friends from AIDS and his parents from old age and tragedy and is surviving his own end time by enjoying classic films and near-anonymous sexual encounters (50,000-copy first printing). In Laskey's So Happy for You, following Center for Fiction First Novel finalist Under the Rainbow, Robin and Ellie have always been best friends, but queer academic Robin has her doubts about being maid of honor in Ellie's forthcoming wedding. In the medieval-set Lapnova, from ever-edgy, New York Times best-selling Moshfegh, hapless shepherd's son Marek--close only to a midwife feared for her ungodly way with nature--is caught up in the violence surrounding a cruel and corrupt lord. In this follow-up to Newman's multi-starred The Heavens, all The Men in the world mysteriously vanish at once, leaving women both to grieve and to rebuild. Prix Marguerite Yourcenar winner Nganang follows up hisLJ best-booked When the Plums Are Ripe with A Trail of Crab Tracks, whose protagonist slowly reveals his story--and the story of Cameroon's independence--on a prolonged stay with his son in the United States. The dedicated assistant principal at a New Jersey public high school thinks she has a lock on the principal's job when the current principal retires, but alas for the durable protagonist of Perrotta's Election, Tracy Flick [still] Can't Win (300,000-copy first printing). In Thrust, a motherless child from the late 21st century learns that she can connect with people over the last two centuries, from a French sculptor to a dictator's daughter; from Yuknavitch, a Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize finalist.
Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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May 30, 2022
PEN/Faulkner award winner Hannaham (Delicious Foods) returns with a timely if sometimes frustrating depiction of life on the edges of America’s prison-industrial complex. Carlotta Mercedes comes home to Brooklyn after serving more than 20 years in prison for armed robbery. Carlotta, a Black and Colombian trans woman who was abused in prison, is a live wire, by turns self-pitying, angry, thoughtful, and raunchily funny. Carlotta’s series of antic encounters with family members, her parole officer, and old friends from the neighborhood doesn’t amount to much of a story, but it gives plenty of opportunities for Carlotta to riff and grouse. Late in the book, after she’s robbed of $500 she’d tucked in her underwear next to what she calls her Señora Problema, Carlotta imagines the thief trying to spend the money at a department store: “I’m sorry, Sir, this money reeks a pussy. Bloomingdale policy be that we don’t assept no kinda pussystank moneys.” She has plenty of wit and verve, and readers are sure to cheer on Carlotta’s doomed efforts to stay clean and out of trouble, but, even so, the underplotted chronicle tends to lag. It’s fun for a while, but it’s not the author’s best. Agent: Doug Stewart, Sterling Lord Literistic. -
Starred review from July 1, 2022
Carlotta Mercedes, a "forty mmmhmm" year-old Black Colombian trans woman serving a 20-year sentence in a men's prison in Ithaca for a crime committed when she was "Dustin Chambers," has won her fifth try at parole. Loosed on her home town of Brooklyn, she will spend a head-spinning Fourth of July weekend attempting to reconnect with her Alzheimer's-afflicted mother, her obese recluse brother, and her estranged born-again son; all while flailing through job interviews and disastrous flirtations and avoiding her parole officer. Carlotta is ambivalent about leaving: the years of prison rape and draconian control "meant that she was cared for. Not cared about, mind you. But for Carlotta, life inside had started to mean that people knew she existed." Outside, she marvels at the simple pleasure of being able to leave a room whenever she wishes and never takes her liberty for granted the way screen-tethered New Yorkers do. Carlotta's journey from Ithaca, carrying her talisman, antagonizing a one-eyed man, and plunging into a drug-induced fever dream while seeking a lost son, echoes another linguistically brilliant novel, James Joyce's Ulysses. Yet Hannaham (Pilot Imposter, 2021), winner of the PEN/Faulkner and Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Delicious Foods (2015), has created a gloriously original character with an unmistakable voice and an unforgettable story.COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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When Carlotta Mercedes is paroled after 20 years and four parole board rejections, she finally gets to live her life as the woman she is instead of the man who went to prison. Author James Hannaham narrates the third-person elements of his novel in a straightforward manner. His performance gets a boost from trans comedian Flame Monroe as Carlotta, whose ruminations, expectations, recriminations, and, most of all, sharp observations are given voice as she rediscovers Brooklyn, family, and old friends. Monroe, and through her Carlotta, is sassy, empathetic, and inspired even when dealing with memories of her time in prison, surrounded by men, and her current difficulty of needing to cash a check without an actual bank account. F.M.R.G. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine -
Starred review from December 1, 2022
Hannaham's (Delicious Foods) latest opens as Carlotta Mercedes is granted parole after 20 years in a men's prison. In short, a trans woman transitions from incarceration to release just in time for the Fourth of July weekend in the now unfamiliar Brooklyn neighborhood of her youth. Carlotta wants to reconcile with her son and reacquaint herself with her family, all while not violating the conditions of her parole. Her homecoming is a chaotic mess, but she faces each situation with optimism and figures her way through it. Dual readers Flame Monroe and Hannaham make the shifting voice and perspectives easy to follow. Hannaham is the star of the show, voicing Carlotta as a resilient, energetic delight who holds surprisingly few grudges after years of abuse while serving time for a crime she did not commit, knowing that it will take everything she's got to maintain her freedom. Listeners are privy not only to what she says, but also to what she thinks. VERDICT This masterpiece of absurdist humor uses the narration to elevate the text and is highly recommended for public library collections.--Christa Van Herreweghe
Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Starred review from July 1, 2022
A trans woman returns home after spending half her life in a men's prison. She has a lot to say. The title character of Hannaham's superb third novel is a Black Colombian woman who's just been paroled after spending nearly 22 years in prison. She was an accomplice in her cousin's robbery of a Brooklyn liquor store that led to a shopkeeper's murder; she transitioned during her incarceration, leading to routine abuses by inmates and correctional officers, including serial rape in solitary confinement. Upon her release, though, her demeanor is undefeated and stubbornly irrepressible: Hannaham often starts paragraphs with omniscient third-person descriptions followed by abrupt, unpunctuated interruptions by Carlotta. ("Carlotta turned on her heel and rushed back to the subway Yo this shit's too much a too much!") It's an effective rhetorical technique, showing her urge to take control of the narrative while counteracting the kinds of "official" narratives that get the story wrong about women like her. It also simply makes Carlotta's story engrossing reading. Carlotta's travels through Fort Greene, Brooklyn, during the day or so the novel tracks are only moderately eventful--finding her parole officer, applying for a job, visiting family, attempting to drive a car, attending a wake--but all of it is enlivened with her commentary. Much of her sass is a survival instinct--eventually we learn just how traumatized she is, and she's enduring what proves to be a difficult reentry into society. In parts the book reads like a time-travel story, as Carlotta observes changes in technology, manners, and her old stomping grounds. And in its day-in-the-life framing, hyperlocality, and rhetorical invention, it's also an homage to Ulysses, whose ending is flagrantly echoed here. Carlotta deserves a lot of things society rarely provides to women like her--among them, a role in great fiction. Hannaham gives Carlotta her due. A brash, ambitious novel carried by an unforgettable narrator.COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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