Summary: Boom Town by Nic Stone centers on a strip club employee who searches for her former work bestie after the replacement hiree also goes missing. Now that two women have disappeared without a trace, she finds all trails lead to one mysterious man.
Synopsis: Micah, who goes by Lyriq, works at Boom Town, an established strip club in Atlanta. She gained notoriety performing with Felice, known as Lucky. Lyriq distances herself after a devastating breast cancer diagnosis. She has undergone surgeries to remove her breasts and is deciding on reconstruction surgery. The burden is too heavy to share with Lucky.
But Lucky takes the distance as abandonment. She finds solace with a customer named Thomas McIntyre. Thomas is not the average patron; he is a White man and a secretive music executive. He tells Lucky he wants a baby while his wife does not. Lucky gravitates toward Thomas’ promise of helping her find meaningful work outside Boom Town.
Lyriq is usually resting whenever she gets a chance at the club. She can no longer dance, but she helps keep the club running smoothly. One night, she finds Lucky after an assault. She knows Lucky needs her, but when she tries to understand the turn of events, Lucky is gone.
When Lucky stops showing up to work, Lyriq assigns Lucky’s locker to Damaris, who becomes Charm. She vouches for Charm as a favor, but the teen is having trouble applying her dance skills to Boom Town’s expectations. Then, Charm disappears. But so do thousands of dollars from the club. Lyriq is now forced to find Charm (and the money) and start the search for Lucky.
Theme: Power, privilege, and control
Like in most (if not all) stories surrounding a strip club, the power dynamics are clear-cut. The dancers are at the bottom of the hierarchy. The clients who are enjoying their bodies hold the power. In this story, the women are navigating their lives around the obstacles to hold onto their power.
Lucky and Charm don’t matter to Bones, the club’s manager. He is furious about Charm stealing money from the club. But he sees their disappearances as annoyances; he has to hire more dancers. And on top of that, he is losing money over Lucky and Lyriq’s act coming to an abrupt halt. It is due to Lyriq’s health condition, which triggers a domino effect as Lucky becomes dangerously close to Thomas and subsequently disappears.
The club holds some power over them. Lyriq stays at the job to pay for her health care. Lucky has a master’s degree in education, yet makes more money as a dancer than on a teacher’s salary. Then, she gets trapped in Thomas’s web of deceit to the point Lyriq belatedly questions the bond.
The surroundings these women had lived in before the strip club felt overpowering as well. Before she became Lucky, Felice separated herself from her family. Before she became Charm, Damaris was involved with a youth pastor at her church. She was underage while believing she was in a mature relationship. To find their power, they found themselves at Boom Town, where their power was under threat again. Micah, Felice, and Damaris are fighting to gain control over their situations.
Theme: Missing Black women and chosen family
A body is found in the first chapter of the novel. Lady Josephine, an unhoused woman, discovers the body in the woods, where she has created a home. She represents a segment of the population of missing Black women.
The main theme of the novel is the plight of missing Black women and how they can quietly disappear from a community. Boom Town is a place of business, but when two employees stop coming to work without an explanation, nothing happens. Nobody reports them missing. People who are looking for them feel like they could get more done than the police. And some people do not connect their absence to a disappearance.
It’s a strip club, while most corporate workplaces will at least contact authorities if an employee fails to show up. Boom Town is a place where many workers have severed ties with friends and families outside of it. This is why Lyriq knows she must look for Lucky and Charm.
As for Charm, she has Dejuan, a friend she was living with, who comes to the club looking for her and raises the alarm on her disappearance. This heightens Lyriq’s concern and forces her to activate the hunt for Lucky, too.
Theme: Motherhood
Being a mother takes on many definitions in this story. Lyriq serves as a motherly figure to Lucky and Charm. She knows she is the one looking out for these girls in a dangerous environment, inside and outside Boom Town.
According to Thomas, his wife, LaBrettney aka Brett, does not want a baby. He is obsessed with having a child. Lucky finds herself becoming empathetic. But her empathy leads to danger. More threads tied to motherhood and reproductive choices affect Felice, Damaris, and Brett.
Conclusion: The author’s adult debut novel has heart and grit, but it is a rocky read with multiple first-person points of view shifting back and forth from the present and the past. The writing is stream-of-consciousness, so the characters’ voices lift off the page. For some readers, this may distract them from engaging with the story. There is a lot of exposition, where the author explains backstory upon backstory and bookends chapters with the present. The story is unique and thrilling for a commercial fiction novel, but the changes in voice and writing style weigh it down, potentially heightening or diminishing engagement.
