A Love Noire: A Novel Horror Book Review

When Noire, a hip, Afro-wearing Ph.D. student, walks into Brown Betty Books, her righteousness kicks into overdrive amid the self-identified “talented tenth” who wear their double degrees and five-hundred-dollar shoes like badges of honor. And then Innocent walks in, sits down beside her, and turns her on her head. A dashing, well-heeled investment banker originally from Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa, Innocent seems interested in her ... but he’s one of them.

Before meeting him, Noire shunned the “bourgie” world of black monied cosmopolitans like Innocent, opting instead for socially conscious—but economically challenged—artists and urban intellectuals. Their mutual attraction blossoms into lust and eventually love, but it lives in the shifting sands of personal beliefs and professional ambitions that are often at odds.

Set in present-day New York City with jaunts to Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean, A Love Noire is the story of an unlikely couple that struggles to discover whether their passion will keep them together, or if their differences will tear them apart. Stripped to their barest selves, Innocent and Noire transcend all they’ve known to learn the redemptive power of love.

A Love Noire offers an insider’s look at color and class struggles, urban living, life in Africa, the notoriously unpredictable and heady New York dating scene, and good old-fashioned love. A natural and potent storyteller, Ms. Turnipseed writes of love and family with grace, and A Love Noire, her debut, marks the arrival of a resonant, sparkling voice in contemporary fiction.