No matter what Carlotta goes through, she never loses her belief in love and in life, reflecting on the human tendency to ‘treat ev’thing like it was worthless when it was really so precious, when that shit was our lives’. Ultimately, Hannaham’s great achievement is the way in which he weaves from third person narrative to first person interjections within the same sentences, infusing the book with Carlotta’s voice and personality, one which wins the reader over thanks to her sheer vivacity, resilience and optimism. It is clear how ripe Carlotta’s situation is for comedy, and Hannaham is brilliantly funny in both plotting and phrasing, as when the narrator describes Carlotta feeling ‘like a brain-damaged African elephant trying to jump into a game of double Dutch’, or when Carlotta engages in a snap-battle with her son, Ibe, culminating in, ‘here you think I’m a ignant fool an a crook-ass tranny bitch, an it turn out I’m a genius who be quotin Shakespeare’. Oh, and the son you’ve dreamed of seeing for so long is pursuing a career in Christian rap and believes that your new self is the work of Satan.
It sure is, if you’ve spent the last 20 years being systematically abused by those who were meant to be safeguarding you, finally found some semblance of love with a murderous but dreamy inmate named Frenzy, been released back into a drastically altered New York, been given a list of impossible parole stipulations, found that the only person who remembered your release date is a niece you’ve never met, and that your family home is playing host to a drunk orgy of a funeral when you’re not allowed to be around booze or drugs.
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