Delicious Foods

Delicious Foods opens with Eddie, seventeen, driving away from a farm in Louisiana without his hands. He heads north, eventually to St. Cloud, Minnesota, in search of his Aunt Bethella. The novel then goes back six years to explain how he lost them. His mother, Darlene, never recovers from the murder of her husband, Nat, a Black activist killed in their small Louisiana town. Grief drives her to crack, and one day she disappears. While eleven year old Eddie searches for her, Darlene has been lured into a van with promises of a good job and a better life and carried off to a remote farm run by a company called Delicious Foods, where she and the other addicts are held captive, working the fields to pay down a debt for food, lodging and the drugs the farm keeps supplying.

Eddie finds his way to the farm and is swallowed by it too. How, the brutal manager, puts the boy on adult shifts, and when Eddie's competence begins to threaten the people who run the place he is locked into iron handcuffs, and getting free of them costs him both hands, with Darlene there to stanch the bleeding. He escapes and makes a life in Minnesota as a repairman, and the novel ends years later, when Darlene's heart attack brings her son back to her side.

The boldest thing in the book is its narrator. Much of the story is told by the crack itself, which calls itself Scotty, a seductive, funny voice like the devil on Darlene's shoulder. Hannaham plays the darkest material for comedy and satire, and the mix of horror and jokes will not suit every reader; the abuse on the farm is hard to read. Kirkus called it "a poised and nervy study of race in a unique voice" and read Eddie's lost hands as "a potent allegory for centuries of black men and women stripped of the power to control their destinies." Brandi Spaethe at Lambda Literary put it simply: "I haven't read a more affecting novel in years." It suits readers who can take brutality told partly as a joke, and who want a novel about addiction that refuses to look away.