That memory and law school debt are enough to have Aretha hankering for the security of making partner. “There were rules in the town where she grew up, and one of them was that you were supposed to live in a house, even if your parents didn’t have house money and their parents didn’t either and there weren’t that many people that would sell a house to people who looked like you.” Cauley nimbly maneuvers climate change and cutthroat competition in the service of corporate overlords as well as the ongoing precarity of Black homeownership, which is captured in Aretha’s thoughts about her “house cleaner mom and security guard dad” and her childhood in Wisconsin. In addition to a backyard bunker, guns abound and provide literary ammunition for this clever work about being secure in a world shot through with issues of race and class, vulnerability and power.

The bags feature a guy fleeing with a cup of joe in one hand and a rifle in the other beneath the inscription “Tactical Coffee, because you don’t want to fall asleep during the apocalypse.” The odd trio run their coffee business out of the brownstone. He smells of ressentiment and peach alcohol. Roommate James, a white man from Georgia, was fired from his Washington Post reporting gig for plagiarizing. (Jan.Aaron actually co-owns the brownstone with Brittany, a formidable Bostonian alienated from her parents but not their resources. It’s a good story, but it should have gone straight to screenplay. Cauley’s understanding of plot is impeccable and she keeps the tension taut as Aretha gets more involved with the group, but though the author lightly grapples with the politics of gun ownership, the matter is ultimately reduced to cheap thrills (Aretha, for instance, “wanted to enjoy the rush of her last trip to make money off guns”), and the characters are written to type. With Aaron out of town sourcing beans, Aretha accompanies James on gun runs, but in her determination to prove her worth, she loses focus at work and starts slipping up. But once Aretha moves in, she finds out the household members, who include James, a disgraced former journalist, are stockpiling guns and making other preparations for survival, having been stirred in part by Sandy’s destruction (the business name, Tactical Coffee, ought to have been a red flag). Meanwhile, after countless failed dates, she meets and falls in love with coffee entrepreneur Aaron, who lives with his business partner, Brittany, in the Brooklyn house they collectively own. Aretha is a successful Black corporate attorney assigned to squash a bunch of homeowners’ insurance claims following Superstorm Sandy. TV writer Cauley’s well-crafted if schematic debut involves a New York City lawyer’s quest to make partner at her firm and find love.

The survivalists kashana cauley