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    Delicious Foods: A Novel
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    Delicious Foods: A Novel
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    Delicious Foods: A Novel
    Audiobook11 hours

    Delicious Foods: A Novel

    Published by Hachette Audio

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    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    WINNER OF THE 2016 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION WINNER OF THE HURSTON/WRIGHT LEGACY FICTION AWARD

    FINALIST FOR THE 2016 DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE

    FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES PRIZE FOR FICTION

    NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR: New York Times, Washington Post

    A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, Kirkus, BuzzFeed, National Post, Kansas City Star

    TOP 10 BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Publishers Weekly
    TOP 15 BOOKS OF THE YEAR: BookPage

    Held captive by her employers--and by her own demons--on a mysterious farm, a widow struggles to reunite with her young son in this uniquely American story of freedom, perseverance, and survival.

    Darlene, once an exemplary wife and a loving mother to her young son, Eddie, finds herself devastated by the unforeseen death of her husband. Unable to cope with her grief, she turns to drugs, and quickly forms an addiction. One day she disappears without a trace.

    Unbeknownst to eleven-year-old Eddie, now left behind in a panic-stricken search for her, Darlene has been lured away with false promises of a good job and a rosy life. A shady company named Delicious Foods shuttles her to a remote farm, where she is held captive, performing hard labor in the fields to pay off the supposed debt for her food, lodging, and the constant stream of drugs the farm provides to her and the other unfortunates imprisoned there.

    In Delicious Foods, James Hannaham tells the gripping story of three unforgettable characters: a mother, her son, and the drug that threatens to destroy them. Through Darlene's haunted struggle to reunite with Eddie, through the efforts of both to triumph over those who would enslave them, and through the irreverent and mischievous voice of the drug that narrates Darlene's travails, Hannaham's daring and shape-shifting prose infuses this harrowing experience with grace and humor.

    The desperate circumstances that test the unshakeable bond between this mother and son unfold into myth, and Hannaham's treatment of their ordeal spills over with compassion. Along the way we experience a tale at once contemporary and historical that wrestles with timeless questions of love and freedom, forgiveness and redemption, tenacity and the will to survive.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette Audio
    Release dateMar 17, 2015
    ISBN9781478900528
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for Delicious Foods

    4/5

    102 ratings14 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This will be one of the unforgettable stories of the year for me. Bitter, bittersweet.
    • 5/5
      A horrifyingly good book about addiction, racial injustice, abuse, and salvation. Eddie and his mother, Darlene, are particularly well-drawn characters, so much so that they appear real. Giving Scotty, the addiction, a voice is brilliant. What was particularly horrifying to me (and that's why I call it a "horrifyingly good book") is that I can actually see this happening. A van pulls into a parking lot where there are homeless, desperate people. A person emerges and promises employment, a sweet place to live, a refuge. And so you, the homeless, desperate person, enter because who else is offering you anything? And then...well, what hell is this?!I couldn't find much wrong with this book and the ending, the last few paragraphs, were spot on.
    • 4/5
      This excellent novels focuses on very current themes: corporate agriculture, drug addiction, illegal and immoral labor practices, racism, grief, modern slavery, and single parenting.

      Eddie's mother Darlene gives in to drug addiction in her extreme grief after her husband's murder. As she struggles to raise and support her son--and ten support her addiction--she grows desperate. An offer of an amazing agricultural job leaves her virtually enslaved and in debt to the company. As young Eddie tries to find his mom, she continues to struggle with grief, addiction, and her own feelings of worthlessness.
    • 4/5
      A very difficult book due to the dreadful savagery portrayed but very well written and almost hopeful in the end.
    • 5/5
      A dark, disturbing yet hopeful book. A stark exploration of racism, drug addiction, labor exploitation practices of large scale farming operations and the deep connection of family even in the darkest circumstances. A powerful novel that I highly recommend for those not faint of heart.
    • 4/5
      catching up on reviews,Now that I have gotten a bedA very original and creative plot, a dark comedy using every racial stereotype that can be misconstrued, and a narrator named "Scotty" crack cocaine speaking for Darlene. This book starts off with a very shocking revelation and we learn how, "Scotty" managed to get such a hold on Darlene, to the point where she is able to almost completely forget her son.At one point this reminded me of the Goldie Hawn movie, Private Benjamin, where she is promised a condoms, vacation pay and other outrageous perks to join the army. Here Darlene is promised starred accommodation, deluxe pay with benefits, and unlimited , Scotty. Trouble is it's not real, but the drug sure makes up for a lot. Promises forgetfulness, a food time when catching watermelons. Black humor for sure. Cleverly done, yes but maybe a little too clever at times, found it was getting to over done, irksome instead of entertaining. Such a fine line for an author to draw.But for me it was the raw and outpouring honesty of grief, the hopelessness of regaining all that was lost, a happy family, son and mother torn apart by a death and a drug that took this to a different level. How hard it is to rise again, to feel hope, even just to feel at all. How much easier to just call on ,"Scottie", so pain can be eased. This was a very good character study, using outrageous themes and methods in tactful ways to present to the reader how harder it is to win and even to lose.ARC from Publisher.
    • 5/5
      This is a great book. It grabs you in the first couple of pages and doesn't let go till the end. When Scotty started talking It took me a minute to figure out who Scotty was. This author is Brilliant!!! This should be a must read for all teenage kids. Not that it's a teenage book but it sure is an eye opener to the dangers of drugs and alcohol. It makes you feel as though the author was seeing two lives through the eyes of three different, first hand views. Way to go James!!
    • 4/5
      Eddie, is a teenager, fleeing the state, in a borrowed car. He has recently lost both hands and is driving with painful stumps. How he ended up in this predicament and where he is headed, is slowly revealed.His mother, Darlene is a crack addict and has been hired to work in the fields, for a shady company called Delicious Foods. She, basically becomes a prisoner here, with many other addicts, doing hard labor and being paid, with crack cocaine. She yearns to escape.The third, POV character, is Scotty, a funny and inventive twist, since Scotty is the voice of Crack Cocaine, narrating the story over Darlene's shoulder, observing her surroundings with humor, insight and plenty of street cred.Obviously, this debut novel is not for everyone but it is a smart and well-written. Most of it is pretty grim, but Scotty shines a little light now and then, making the going a bit more tolerable, plus there is just enough social commentary to chew on. If you are you in the mood for something, bold and off the wall, give this one a try.
    • 4/5
      Hannaham depicts a modern version of slavery in DELICIOUS FOODS, where the plantation is the exploitive American food industry and the shackles are drugs. His protagonist is Darlene an intelligent college-educated African-American woman who loses her husband to a racist attack on his business and subsequently falls into a street life of drug addiction and prostitution. She is recruited by Delicious Foods, a company that systematically exploits desperate street people with offers of low wage fieldwork accompanied by unrealistically high expenses that lead to unremitting debt. Readily available drugs ensure acceptance of these desperate conditions. This is a metaphor for the choices that many African-Americans face in our society: the helplessness of a racist system that systematically prays on them and offers few alternatives for escape. Two other narrative voices in the novel represent avenues for escape—one of these is to a fulfilling life with family and society while the other is to a life of drug addiction. Darlene’s young son, Eddie seeks to rescue them. He redeems himself with his aunt and a career as a handyman in Minnesota. However, his escape comes at an extreme personal cost, which seems to suggest that this type of escape often requires sacrifices that can leave lasting scars. The other voice is Scotty. He is Darlene’s cravings for crack cocaine and only offers a life as a drug addict. Scotty is street slang for crack and seems to come from Captain Kirk’s oft repeated command to his engineer in the Star Trek TV series, “beam me up, Scotty.” Hannaham’s most successful narrative element in the novel is Scotty’s voice. He uses him to make important and insightful observations about racism in America and the allure of drugs. Scotty’s narrative voice is peppered with dark humor and the use of abundant street slang. The other characters, including Darlene and Eddie, seem too passive and uncritical to elicit much sympathy, although this may have been intentionally done to depict the helplessness that is so common in victims of racism.
    • 4/5
      I will admit that I started out reading the print book but I was just not feeling it. Then I tried the audio book for me and I became enthralled. Kudos to the author who narrates the audio book for making the characters soar. I knew that crack cocaine would be a character but not sure how it would work – but “Scotty” is certainly a character and his point-on-view on addiction and the choice and reasons were both amusing and scary.I found this to be a cunningly unique storyline that uses at times ridiculousness and/or parody to look at serious issues in our society that often we push aside if they do not affect us directly. I did like how the parody on the plantation system is used to show how past horrors can be morphed into the present. Themes of grief, greed, hope, choice, freedom, apathy, and survival are illustrated here. There are parts that are disturbing and there are parts that seem unbelievable yet the reader cannot turn away. Sometimes we need to be pushed outside of comfort zones to have our eyes opened to the discrimination and pathos that is too normal for many disadvantaged people.
    • 4/5
      FictionJames HannahamDelicious Foods: A NovelNew York: Little, Brown and CompanyHardcover, 978-0-316-28494-3371 pages, $26.00May 5, 2015 “Forgiveness never ends, he thought to himself. Either it’s a bottomless cup or it’s nothing.” James Hannaham’s Delicious Foods grabs you in the first paragraph and the curve balls keep your attention. Darlene, Eddie’s mother, is devastated by the murder of her husband. This educated middle-class woman, brought low by what she considers her guilt in his death, finds oblivion in crack cocaine. One night as Darlene is walking the streets of Houston, a minibus pulls up and she’s offered a job making good money and a nice place to stay with a company called Delicious Foods. The company harvests broken people and Darlene disappears. Eddie, eleven years old, sets out to find her and bring her home. The story, moving from the present to the past and back again, is told from the shifting perspectives of the child Eddie and the crack, in first-person narration. That’s right. The crack, which lives inside Darlene’s head, is a character in Delicious Foods, and why not? It’s Darlene’s main motivation. Known in street slang as “Scotty,” the crack is funny and philosophical, with an impatient affection for Darlene, and refers to them as “we,” a single entity. But make no mistake, Scotty is in charge. Hannaham deftly employs a sardonic, weary humor. “Everybody black knows how to react to a tragedy. Just bring out a wheelbarrow full of the Same Old Anger, dump it all over the Usual Frustration, and water it with Somebody Oughtas…Then quietly set some globs of Genuine Awe in a circle around the mixture, but don’t call too much attention to that. Mention the Holy Spirit whenever possible.” Scotty is opinionated and possesses another sort of humor, equally distinctive, in his commentaries. “Texas was stupid. I’m sorry. Fat sunburned gluttons and tacky mansions everyplace, glitzy cars that be the size of a pachyderm, a thrift store and a pawnshop for every five motherfuckers… Whole state and everything up in that bitch made of limestone…Granite salesmen getting jealous. In summer, Texas too hot for 99 percent of life-forms…” As good as Hannaham is at humor, he is equally adept at conveying little Eddie’s anguish, abandonment, and confusion. “It occurred to him that he was doing her job, but he didn’t notice the cloud of resentment forming in his love for her, his hostility growing darker. I’m the son, he whispered to himself. The son can’t take care of the mother.” One night as he is trying to describe Darlene to a woman on the street: “If he didn’t find her that night, he would need a picture. He struggled to create an image of his mother with his undeveloped tools, and watched his failure reflected in the woman’s blank expression. He could not handle this alone. . . .” Delicious Foods, a powerful story of the exploitation of throwaway people and the will to survive, is simultaneously poignant and irreverent and a startlingly original accomplishment.
    • 4/5
      SEASON THREE OF THE ABC SERIES AMERICAN CRIME PREMIERED ON MARCH 12. THIS SEASON SHINES A SPOTLIGHT ON INDENTURED SERVITUDE, ESSENTIALLY SLAVERY, IN THE U.S. AGRICULTURAL INDUSTRY. AND THAT IS THE THEME OF THIS VERY GOOD NOVEL THAT APPEARED IN 2016. AS THE OPENING PARAGRAPH OF THE REVIEW ILLUSTRATES, AGRICULTURAL SLAVERY DOES EXIST IN THE U.S. TODAY.
      Delicious Foods

      By James Hannaham

      Every once in a while when sitting down to dinner, perhaps you wonder idly where your veggies and fruits come from, maybe even who grows and picks them for you. Even under the best of circumstances picking and packing crops is hard work. But who would believe slave laborers pick and pack our food? Overworked, underpaid, yes, but not virtual slaves, right?

      Yet, while not the norm, slave labor does exist in the USA. Don’t believe it? Google Jewel Goodman, Tampa Bay Times, and read about near slavery of the type James Hannaham uses as a focal point of his powerful and fast-paced novel of people in desperate poverty and in the throes of crack cocaine addiction. As the story reports, “Goodman is one of more than 1,000 slaves who have gained freedom in Florida since 1997.” The thrust being: Delicious Foods is less the product of wild imagination than even wilder and sadder reality for too many.

      We meet Eddie in flight, on his way to Minnesota, driving a car, steering with his forehead and arms, as where once he had hands, now are phantoms and bloody stumps. We see how he overcomes and establishes himself as the “Handyman Without Hands,” and then how his predicament came about.

      Scotty tells the bulk of the sorry. He, or it, turns out to be quite a novel narrative device, for readers will be hard pressed to think of a novel narrated by crack cocaine. It’s through his smokey, quelling, and even at times humorous vernacular that readers learn about Darlene, Eddie’s mother.

      Darlene, once a happy college girl, wife of a college basketball star and later civil rights activist, has been reduced, through guilt and hopeless, to a street hooker, answering to the siren call of escapism preached by Scotty. Fleeing her past, enraptured by her addiction, she falls prey to the promises of a better life offered by representatives of Delicious Foods. Once in their grasp, they encumber and shackle her, from the very first moments, in financial servitude.

      For the majority of time, the novel centers on Darlene’s years at Delicious Foods. She lives in deplorably filthy conditions, subsists on what most would regard as not even good enough to be garbage, works long, hard hours under the harshest conditions and abusive supervision, torments herself over her false belief she caused the death of her husband, longs for her son Eddie, dreams of escaping, and mellows all her emotional and physical suffering into the background with the help of her companion, the always available Scotty. It’s her entire servitude to Delicious Foods that readers might think fiction but which, to some degree, is reality for many, and sets you to wondering, “How much pain is in the produce section of the supermarket?”

      The story reconnects with Eddie, a young teen, when he finds his mother and ends up working years beside her on the farm. It’s only his intrepidness, combined with a handful of other determined characters, and a newsman with a nose for exposé, that springs them free of Delicious Foods’ grasp, but at the cost of Eddie’s hands and his relationship with his mother.

      However, readers should not fear a grim ending, as Hannaham brings his tale to a close on a note of hope and redemption regarding Darlene and Eddie, though for some readers this may push the bounds of credulity understanding the tight clutch of Scotty.
    • 4/5
      Really interesting narrative structure (an understatement when crack is a narrator!) that tells the story of a family torn up by institutional racism. I was surprised by how funny this book could be, too, especially the voice of Scotty. I thought it was a bit slow in the middle -- there were a few too many similar chapters about life at Delicious in my opinion -- but overall it was an engaging, upsetting read. Recommended!
    • 4/5
      Darlene was once a respectable wife and mother. Nathaniel, her husband and herself owned a grocery store and they were very involved in making black people understand their rights to vote and such. Their young son, Eddie, was a vital part of their lives. Nathaniel loses his life in a questionable way and Darlene falls apart. She becomes involved in drug taking and has to find ways to sustain that habit. In doing so, she is lured by a group of people who promote a perfect-sounding job with great pay and a wonderful health plan and a really nice place to work.She leaves with this group and essentially disappears, leaving 12 year old Eddie to survive on his own. So he makes it his mission to find his mother. I found this novel so compelling, with Darlene's drug-of-choice having a say in the characterization of the story. Have not read anything quite as interesting in a long time.