Anyone who thinks they can explain it to an outsider is a fool." Margot and her mother, an illustrious actor, are the clandestine family of a high-ranking politician in the public eye who has been leading a double life for 20 years. Lote is a rapturous first novel, a queer black fantasy with angels leaping off every page. Shola von Reinhold is one of Jacaranda Books' 20 Black British authors published in 2020, and what a find. Mathilda's obsession with Druitt takes her to a bizarre art residency in Europe, a century-old cult, and iridescent characters that may well be mirror images of herself. One, the 1920s poet Hermia Druitt, seems to have fallen through the cracks of history, in a cascade of absences, removals and erasures from the archives. Possessed of a “heightened frock consciousness”, she luxuriates in flights of escapism – transfixions – fixated on past black modernists.
“Even today, western conceptions of eccentricity very rarely tend to encompass Black personas,” notes a book read constantly by Mathilda, the narrator. Beginning with the release of the seminal Final Fantasy VII PlayStation game in 1997, Alt conducts a masterful exploration of a history, a people and a culture that have shaped our use of technology, our conception of storytelling, and our fascination with Kitties named "Hello". In many ways, each of the chapters in Matt Alt's consistently entertaining and informative tour through the cultural impact his adopted homeland has had on western society offers his readers exactly that: a rabbit hole of information and context that simply begs to be mined. Otaku, in Japanese culture, denotes an individual who is especially interested in a particular subject and amasses extraordinary knowledge within that context, to the detriment of their social skills and common sense.
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