Friday Black

'Lark Street,' built around an abortion, is Friday Black's most polarizing entry; one reader admits “I'm not sure what the author was arguing for/against here” and says the story was upsetting enough to set the book aside for a day. A Boston Globe critic flags the visible influence of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's Syracuse mentor, George Saunders, as distracting in places, and singles out one image from the title story, “smell of food wafts over the stench of the freshly deceased,” as a detail-level misfire. Entertainment Weekly's otherwise positive review calls the speculative world-building uneven from story to story rather than consistently sturdy. The recurring devices, capitalized faux-historical events and flat declarative narration, start to repeat once a reader notices the pattern, and the violence itself becomes a real barrier: one reader says flatly, “I felt icky after I read it.”