BookBrowse Reviews Pick a Color by Souvankham Thammavongsa

BookBrowse:

A day in the life of a nail salon owner that defies common preconceptions about womanhood and racialized service work.

This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For access to our digital magazine, free books,and other benefits, become a member today.

Souvankham Thammavongsa's debut novel Pick a Color unfolds over the course of a single day in a nail salon called Susan's. The owner and the book's main character, Ning, is a retired boxer who got her start in the industry working at another salon before opening her own place. The store's name is a nod to the fact that every employee—Noi, Mai, Ning herself—wears a name tag that reads "Susan." Ning explains that she doesn't want to get new name tags every time someone quits, and that this convention also makes things easier for her customers:

"And, anyway, the clients will never be wrong when they ask for Susan. Dear Susan is always available and at your service! Susan never takes a day off and Susan is never fully booked if it's you who called for her. Susan, our dear, sweet Susan, always makes time for you."

This obsequious attitude belies Ning and the other salon workers' genuine feelings toward their clients, which are generally on a scale between the kind of restrained fondness one might feel for a pet fish, and outright disdain. The novel is a slice-of-life in which we follow Ning and the other workers through their day, seeing clients and chatting about their lives intermittently. In between the customers and conversation are passages in which Ning meditates on her past and the state of her life.

Ning is a 41-year-old business owner with no close family or friends, by design. She prefers to keep herself free of interpersonal attachments in the way of someone who was once (or many times) hurt badly by someone she let in. We never learn of any incidents like this in her life, as she is as guarded in her narration as she is with her clients and coworkers. In fact, Ning has a physical wound as well—she is missing a finger—the origin of which we never learn. It is such an obvious metaphor for the emotional pain we see occasional glimpses of, but Thammavongsa paints this character's psyche with such a fine brush, and such tender regard, that no detail feels cheap or obvious.

The title comes from the first words a Susan says to a client when they walk in the door, meaning for them to choose what color they would like their nails painted. Ning instructs the new girl, Noi, to always say it twice, because the client will never be listening the first time. This detail speaks to how the customers disregard the very people whom they are asking to perform a service for them and the socioeconomic reasons for that disregard—the clients are suggested to be largely white, wealthy enough to spend money on non-necessities like nail care, whilst the workers are (it is implied) Southeast Asian. Interestingly, we never learn the workers' exact ethnic origin, or origins. In leaving this detail out, Thammavongsa represents a broader, more generalized experience. There is one incident in which a client is outright hostile, but for the most part the workers are ignored, or treated like receptacles for the clients' private thoughts about their husbands, their families, other people's husbands who they are sleeping with. But Ning subverts the reader's expectations of this dynamic from the beginning:

"Looking at the two of us, them sitting on a chair above me, and me down low, you'd think I am not in charge. But I am. I know everything about them...[Y]ou'd be surprised what people tell you when they think you are a stranger and they are never going to see you again."

And it's true. These women are not passive victims of the service economy. They know how to upsell, how to poach customers from the rival salon, how to get exactly what they want. They talk shit in "their" language, so as to not be understood by the English-speaking clientele. There is a baseball player customer they call "Two Pumps," in reference to what they assume about his sexual prowess. The endless vehicular riffing they do about a woman who goes by Van will be familiar to anyone who has ever been desperate to kill time on an eight-hour service industry shift.

It would be easy to assume that the reader is meant to pity Ning, if not for her position as a service worker, then because she seemingly has no love in her life. A simplistic reading of the novel would suggest Ning is in denial about her needs, that she has accepted a life with no close ties because she fears intimacy. But Thammavongsa steers quite wide of that interpretation, depicting Ning as a fiercely independent woman who takes pride in her work and her position as a de facto mentor to the younger women in her employ. Pick a Color is an exceptional character study and an incisive excavation of the racialized labor in the beauty service industry.

This review first ran in the October 22, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.