GREAT BLACK HOPE, debut gay Black author's tale of class, race, and their limits

GREAT BLACK HOPE
ROB FRANKLIN
Summit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available tomorrow

Time's The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 selection

On the ALA's 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence longlist.

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A gripping, elegant debut novel about a young Black man caught between worlds of race and class, glamour and tragedy, a friend’s mysterious death and his own arrest, from an electrifying new voice.

An arrest for cocaine possession in the Hamptons on the last day of a sweltering New York summer leaves Smith, a young queer Black Stanford graduate, in a state of turmoil. Pulled into the court system and mandated treatment, he finds himself in an absurd but dangerous situation: his class protects him, but his race does not.

It’s just weeks after the death of his beloved roommate Elle, a glamorous member of the Black elite, and he’s still reeling from the tabloid spectacle—as well as the lingering questions of how well he really knew his closest friend and what exactly happened to her that night. He flees to his hometown of Atlanta, but the weight of expectations from his family of doctors, lawyers, and college presidents only pushes him further into his downward spiral. When his close friend Carolyn goes off the rails, Smith decides to return to New York to find out what happened to her and Elle. But it’s not long before he begins to lose himself to his old life, drawn back into the city’s underworld where his search for answers may end up costing him his freedom and his future.

Smith goes on a dizzying journey through the New York City nightlife circuit, anonymous recovery rooms, Atlanta’s Black society set, police investigations and courtroom dramas, and a circle of friends coming of age in a new era. Great Black Hope is a propulsive, glittering story about what it means to exist between worlds, to be upwardly mobile yet spiraling downward, and how to find a way back to hope.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: How do you cope with stress? What kind of stress do you need to cope with? What happens when you can no longer cope, and your coping mechanism is what slides you the next step down your ladder? Are you made of the stuff that helps you hang on? Or is this the moment your life changes trajectory? Will it be up...or down?

Don't choose dull, ordinary challenges for your debut novel, kids. Take a lesson from Author Rob Franklin. Get in there and scrape the bones, break 'em open, pry out the marrow. Don't tell me another Hamptons-rich-druggie story, Fitzgerald owns "West Egg" already, and that snowy white "Less than Zero" guy wiped up the corners. Making your bottoming-out addict Black in this milieu feels revolutionary!

Unless you know what PG means, and who starred in which season of The Real Housewives of Atlanta.

Young Mr. Smith isn't a unicorn, but he understands from the inside the burden and the unfairness of being a race man. He's got the money, the education, and the training to function in the top tier of the New York business world. Yet it costs him much more to claim his place there because he's Black...and gay.

It all comes to a head and begins to fry his brain as the novel opens with his arrest for cocaine possession in the Hamptons. A thing that wouldn't register for a white person, but despite his gigantic privilege among Black people, he's just another Black man among the really privileged. Awaiting his court appearance leaves young Mr. Smith a lot of time to process his stressors and figure out how to deal with New York life. We're along with him as the death...murder...of his bestie Elle absorbs a lot of his energy. If I had a complaint to air about the story, it's that the murder eats a lot of attention, and results in a lot of self-reflection, growth, and healing...but the resolution is so rushed it feels perfunctory.

I didn't get mad about it, though, because I felt it was all part of the voyage of discovery young Davey Smith was taking in front of me. I'm here for a young gay man discovering how much the world expects from you simply to have the things others just...get. I'm totally immersed in a story where someone privileged suddenly confronts the reality that privilege can be yanked away like any other "gift" from society. It's happened to me so I know how genuine his feeling of being forcibly unmoored really is.

I was never a party-party boy, so found Davey's interest in the nightlife uninteresting. It is just dull to me. I was ultimately able to enjoy the reflections on his loud, annoying, "fun" times because I don't and didn't like them at his age. I found myself thinking "no wonder I never liked that stuff!" a lot of the time. It made the read much more rewarding to me after I got past my own impatience with such an unserious, uninteresting "lifestyle" as clubbing.

In the end I was drawn into learning from the life Davey Snith led after I read this: “Identity was neither destiny nor salvation but a kind of animal trap, useful only if one was deft enough to claim the bait without tripping the door to the cage.” It's a pithy dose of home truth so it gave me a full and complete way into the club I'd pay money to stay out of in the flesh.

That half-star gone is my pound of flesh for being made to work so hard.