Nebraska? Nope. [You'll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey by Amber Ruffin; Lacey Lamar]

*An Indie Next Pick*

Writer and performer on Late Night with Seth Meyers Amber Ruffin writes with her sister Lacey Lamar with humor and heart to share absurd anecdotes about everyday experiences of racism.

Now a writer and performer on Late Night with Seth Meyers and host of The Amber Ruffin Show, Amber Ruffin lives in New York, where she is no one's First Black Friend and everyone is, as she puts it, "stark raving normal." But Amber's sister Lacey? She's still living in their home state of Nebraska, and trust us, you'll never believe what happened to Lacey.

From racist donut shops to strangers putting their whole hand in her hair, from being mistaken for a prostitute to being mistaken for Harriet Tubman, Lacey is a lightning rod for hilariously ridiculous yet all-too-real anecdotes. She's the perfect mix of polite, beautiful, petite, and Black that apparently makes people think "I can say whatever I want to this woman." And now, Amber and Lacey share these entertainingly horrifying stories through their laugh-out-loud sisterly banter. Painfully relatable or shockingly eye-opening (depending on how often you have personally been followed by security at department stores), this book tackles modern-day racism with the perfect balance of levity and gravity.

I spent a lot of quarantine watching Late Night with Seth Meyers. Snarky coverage of the Trump administration's response to the pandemic and everything else that went along with it meant that I was pretty glued to episodes on YouTube pre-Biden win. Pre-2020 I'd watched the show sporadically, but even then skits with Amber Ruffin always stood out the most for me. So I've been quite pleased to see anything Amber Ruffin does. And when I saw this book on NetGalley?! I screamed with girlish glee!

You'll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey by Amber Ruffin and her sister, the titular Lacey Lamar, is a comedic recounting of tales of Nebraska/American Midwestern racism. Primarily, the homegrown racism Lacey has experienced living in this place that I now have an extra strong aversion to never visiting. I found myself riotously laughing and telling my mother about what I'd read. But as I closed my read I realized why I'd been enjoying the book so much, what exactly was so attractive about what I was reading. It's commiseration. It's complaining about racism and understanding this experience the way only another Black woman can. Feeling the pain of quiet acceptance or the joy of seeing loud comeuppance.

Reliving microaggressions and overt offenses isn't the draw here, but the collective shock that we suffer through it. The shock transformed with comedy and relayed with farcical rancor. It kind of made the terrible racism, funny? I had no real sense of Nebraska before, but having read these select tales of what happened to Lacey I feel a bit too familiar. 5 stars for the laughs, 5 stars for the pain.

You'll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey is due for publication January 12, 2021.