As one of my most anticipated books since I heard the premise and saw the cover, HOUSE OF COTTON by Monica Brashears ended up being a major letdown. Like I mentioned in a previous post, it was taking me a while to understand just what Brashears is attempting to talk about in terms of commodification of the Black body and how easily a White supremacist society can erase our humanity in order to fill their own desires, but I still had hope it would come together in the end and that the foundation was being laid for something great. Magnolia Brown is seemingly stuck making decisions she dreads simply because she’s poor, Black, and grieving, and forced to do weird work in order to pay the bills, but I don’t know that she has any actual character development or growth by the end of the novel. I kept waiting for her to have a moment of clarity, but sis was focused on all the wrong things. While I get that it was supposed to be the insidiousness of racism that’s the horror in this book, even that is rarely addressed but in pithy moments in Magnolia’s head, and the other elements of horror were just…meh.