HARRIET TUBMAN

The famous abolitionist plots her comeback with the help of a hip-hop producer.

The literary debut by Bob the Drag Queen—Instagram star, Madonna concert emcee, and winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race—imagines a host of famous figures returning to life: Cleopatra is a fashion influencer, John D. Rockefeller is a robber baron all over again, and Harriet Tubman, a key figure in the Underground Railroad, wants to share her story via a Hamilton-style album. To assist, she’s assembled a backing band called the Freemans as well as the narrator, Darnell, a producer who’s down on his luck for reasons revealed later in the novel. For the moment, though, the project is an opportunity for him to “reconcile what it means to be Black, queer, and American all at once.” Bob doesn’t explain why Tubman’s resurrection has occurred, or why Tubman is, of all things, a musical talent—the novel is mainly a thought exercise about what Tubman’s ferocity and determination might mean in our current moment. Conceptually, that’s intriguing, but eliding the whys and wherefores would be more forgivable if Bob’s treatment of the conceit wasn’t so simplistic. Insights into the horrors of slavery or pioneering drag figures like William Dorsey Swann are whittled down to observations slight even by the standard of Insta captions. (“I can’t even imagine the patience it must take to wait your turn for freedom. Hell, I don’t even like to sit through commercials on YouTube.”) The role of Quakers in the abolition movement is reduced to a blunt-smoking little person working as Tubman’s DJ. Some imagined lyrics are included, but descriptions of the creative process are shallow. (“She had written a song and wanted me to take a look at it, to see if it was any good. It was great.”) Bob is seemingly concerned that Tubman’s labors aren’t considered relevant to the current moment, but the novel exchanges sepia for cardboard.

A well-intentioned but ill-executed speculative work.