Alyssa Cole’s When No One is Watching is good. But it’s also annoyingly insistent on its message: gentrification is bad.
It’s good for its play with genre – it’s something of a mystery, something of suspense, something of a straight realist character novel. Good, too, for not being fussy with its racial politics – in the sense it isn’t trying to be comforting to a white reader, instead just explaining clearly how the arrival of white people in historically black neighbourhoods causes direct and indirect harm.
I guess the ways it is annoying extend beyond that repeated hammering on the effects of gentrification. It’s also bad for the romance plot – like there’s this sex scene that I was just like: where did this come from and it was so sexy. Not that I can’t read a sex scene! Just that it felt out of place in the tone and pacing of the rest of the book.
So I’m not convinced this is a story that needed to be a novel. A rewrite as a short story would be interesting? Maybe.
Literary Vice 