Eight novels about class & racial tensions in the suburbs

Kate Broad holds a BA from Wellesley College and a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center. She is a Bronx Council on the Arts award winner for fiction, and her writing appears or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, No Tokens, The Brooklyn Review, and elsewhere.

Greenwich is her first novel.

At Electric Lit Broad tagged eight "novels about class and racial tensions in the American suburbs, each of them engrossing and unsettling, concerned with the powerful forces that shape a community. These are books about belonging, about insiders and outsiders, that ask how far we’ll go and how much we’ll risk in pursuit of the good life."

One title on the list:

Good Neighbors by Sarah Langan

New to suburban Long Island, Brooklyn transplant Gertie Wilde thinks she’s finally found an idyllic home for her family on Maple Street, especially thanks to her new friend and neighbor Rhea Schroeder. But when a sinkhole opens in the neighborhood and Rhea’s daughter falls in, Rhea turns against the Wildes in a frantic effort to protect her own reputation and find an easy target to blame. She hurls vicious accusations against Gertie’s husband, and things quickly escalate into a frenzied neighborhood witch hunt. Maple Street is majority white, and it’s clear the one Indian American family on the block had better get in line. But class in this novel is as much of a marker of outsider status as race, and the consequences for anyone who doesn’t fit in and follow the rules can be deadly.

Read about the other titles on the list at Electric Lit.

Good Neighbors is among Katrina Monroe's nine terrible mothers in horror, Chris Cander's eight novels about dealing with difficult neighbors, and Amelia Kahaney's six top coming-of-age mysteries & thrillers.

The Page 69 Test: Good Neighbors.

My Book, The Movie: Good Neighbors.

--Marshal Zeringue