Good Hair

"Alice Andrews is a hard working journalist from a working class African American family in Newark who has always felt "between": neither "ghetto" not "buppie" not Afro-tique. After breaking up with her aggressive, upwardly mobile boyfriend Miles, she meets a Black Prince Charming. Jack is rich, elegant, and self-assured, but he and his circle of privileged black elite friends and family make Alice feel woefully inadequate. Will Alice ever feel comfortable in Jack's world? She learns that to make their relationship work she will have to face her own demons and insecurities.<br/><br/>Benilde Little's first novel is less polished than her follow up, <i>Who Does She Think She Is?</i>, but it does a similar job of highlighting black class anxieties and the tensions between generations in black families. The strained relationship between Alice and her working class parents feels very real, as does the discomfort she feels with Jack's wealthy mother, who also "married up". Although Little squeezes in a few too many crises and melodramatic elements, this is a solid story set in a milieu that rarely gets the spotlight.<br/><br/>"