SHUT UP, YOU’RE PRETTY
By Tea Mutonji
Synopsis
In Téa Mutonji’s disarming debut story collection, a woman contemplates her Congolese traditions during a family wedding, a teenage girl looks for happiness inside a pack of cigarettes, a mother reconnects with her daughter through their shared interest in fish, and a young woman decides to shave her head in the waiting room of an abortion clinic. These punchy, sharply observed stories blur the lines between longing and choosing, exploring the narrator’s experience as an involuntary one. Tinged with pathos and humour, they interrogate the moments in which femininity, womanness, and identity are not only questioned but also imposed.
Shut Up You’re Pretty is the first book to be published under the imprint VS. Books, a series of books curated and edited by writer-musician Vivek Shraya featuring work by new and emerging Indigenous or Black writers, or writers of colour.
Richard says
This is Tea Mutonji’s debut novel, and it’s a sparkler. This young woman paints a pastiche of a Toronto neighbourhood with a verbal brush of pixie dust, creative magic and writing gems. She sprinkles her phrasing jewels around like spices in a Jamaican roti, nippy but savoury, spicey but tasty. For her first effort, she hits notes that are expected of experienced veteran authors, not debuting first-timers.
She writes about the eastern neighbourhood above the Scarborough Bluffs, an area that battles economic woes and the associated distresses that accompany them, drugs, gangs, prostitution, vandalism and crime. These were her daily companions as she grew up. Somehow, she detached herself from stagnating in the life of a street person and wrote about it. Wrote more than a snapshot of the misery that is the stereo-expectation of that life. Somehow, she managed to snap shots of familial joy and congenial warmth in a region devoid of those. Even though she is one of the many socially dysfunctional players on this malfunctioning cast, she is able to pull away and paint a portrait that is more than the sum of its parts but is a jigsaw of precious stones in a heap of broken humanity.
A fun read, an interesting model for writers just beginning their writing journey. As a writer, ‘Shut up, You’re pretty’ will make you pause and ponder, fascinated by her turn of a phrase, transfixed by the snap of her verbalized thought.
