Appeared on best of the year lists from The Washington Post, NPR, The Guardian, and more! Nominated for an NAACP Image Award and Winner of the Believer Book Award for Fiction!

Hot Comb offers a poignant glimpse into Black women's lives and coming-of-age stories as seen across a crowded, ammonia-scented hair salon while ladies gossip and bond over the burn. The titular "Hot Comb" is about a young girl's first perm--a doomed ploy to look cool and stop seeming "too white" in the all-Black neighborhood her family has just moved into. In "Virgin Hair," taunts of "tender-headed" sting as much as the perm itself. "My Lil Sister Lena" shows the stress of being the only Black player on a white softball team. Lena's hair is the team curio, an object to be touched, a subject to be discussed and debated at the will of her teammates, leading Lena to develop an anxiety disorder of pulling her own hair out. Throughout Hot Comb, Ebony Flowers re-creates classic magazine ads idealizing women's need for hair relaxers and products. "Change your hair form to fit your life form" and "Kinks and Koils Forever" call customers from the page.

Realizations about race, class, and the imperfections of identity swirl through these stories and ads, which are by turns sweet, insightful, and heartbreaking. Flowers began drawing comics while earning her Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction, and her early mastery of sequential storytelling is nothing short of sublime. Hot Comb is a propitious display of talent from a new cartoonist who has already made her mark.

Author: Ebony Flowers
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Published: 06/18/2019
Pages: 184
Weight: 1.14lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.50w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9781770463486

Accelerated Reader:
Reading Level: 3
Point Value: 1
Interest Level: Upper Grade
Quiz #/Name: 517784 / Hot Comb


Review Citation(s):
Booklist 07/01/2019 pg. 42
Shelf Awareness 07/16/2019
Library Journal 11/01/2019 pg. 80

About the Author
Ebony Flowers is a cartoonist and ethnographer specializing in qualitative research and evaluation, picture-based methods, curriculum studies, and STEAM education. She began drawing comics while earning her Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.