BookBrowse Reviews Halsey Street by Naima Coster

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After her father takes a tumble, Penelope Grand returns to a changed Brooklyn.

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Along with homelessness, gentrification is one of the most searing problems in urban areas, creating daily conflicts among neighbors, some of which are harrowing. This is a topic Halsey Street addresses and yet Naima Coster's debut novel is more than the racial migration patterns of Brooklyn, even as gentrification is the context. It is the story of a daughter returning to her childhood neighborhood to take care of her father. It is an extrapolation of the past and the scars that remain from unprocessed shame. It is the unpacking of an artist who never accomplished her dreams and now searches for attachments in the wrong places and with the wrong people as she spirals downward.

Penelope Grand is living in Pittsburgh when she is summoned back home to care for her father. An only child, she feels responsible for his well-being in the last trimester of his life, particularly since her mother left him to return to the Dominican Republic. Unwilling to stay in her father's house on Halsey Street, Penelope rents an attic room in a yellow house from a young white family, the Harpers, who have moved into the neighborhood, a symbol of white migration back to the city.

Author Naima Coster writes about her own neighborhood with lushness while archetypes define the transitional chaos. The white man with empathy (Marcus Harper). The seductive and angry black woman (Penelope Grand). The white woman workaholic (Samantha Harper). The black father who drinks too much and lusts for what he cannot have (Ralph Grand). The withholding Latina mother (Mirella Grand).

Penelope begins an affair with her landlord, the sympathetic husband Marcus Harper. Marcus is attracted to Penelope, and unlike his edgy wife, who is afraid of the neighborhood she has moved into, Marcus is accepting and generous. Penelope is drawn to the side of him that is nurturing. She loves Marcus' patience with his daughter Grace. Unashamed of liking a white man as a sexual partner, Penelope enjoys the affair and is self-loathing at the same time for more specific reasons: Grace is in the house. Penelope is breaking the covenant a married man has with his wife. Needing Marcus selfishly and then reviling men who look like him creates self-alienation and a harsh dislike of herself.

When she's not having sex with Marcus, Penelope teaches art at the local elementary school, now integrated, the same school she once attended. One student named Natalie comes to school hungry, and Penelope shares her lunch with her. Penelope is hungry too. But what is empty inside of her cannot be filled because it centers around maternal detachment.

In her parents' heyday, Ralph and Mirella were a devoted couple. Ralph owned and was proud of Grand Records on Halsey Street. Mirella was his partner in the business, but as the store went under, the marriage fell apart. Mirella returned to the Dominican Republic to a house with a garden and a world she understood. Unable to ease Ralph's depression over his lost store and her own guilt at what happened to Ralph in the aftermath, not to mention her only child's revulsion toward her, Mirella finds comfort in familiar surroundings.

I first read Halsey Street upon its publication in 2018. Its geographical trauma resonated. Brooklyn is a place of love until gentrification becomes untenable. Brooklyn is a place of hope until immigrants experience servitude and invisibility. Naima Coster is the kind of writer who inhales and exhales the setting of her novels, shaping their personality with descriptive prose of streets, living spaces, bars, eateries, both sides of the sky. When the story moves to the Dominican Republic, if you close your eyes tight, you can almost inhale the scent of the tangy rice dish arroz con gandules. Or the papayas roasting in the Dominican sun.

At its heart, Halsey Street is about women and intimacy. The myth of mother-daughter perfection is what Coster shatters, leaving nothing to interpretation. Penelope hates her mother for leaving her father. She says to her mother, "You are nothing to me. As far as I'm concerned, you're already dead." Samantha Harper has a passive relationship with her young daughter Grace, always working, rarely at home, expecting Penelope to babysit without even asking and then taking umbrage when Penelope befriends motherless Grace.

Modern women, Samantha and Penelope are burdened by an absence of trust. While they share the same age cohort, little about them is similar. Penelope is suffering, Samantha is hostile. Penelope is selfish, Samantha is insecure and reactionary. Both lack gratitude. It's the fundamental problem of gentrification when you lay out the math. The awfulness of perception. What you think the other person is and wants, as opposed to who they are and what they really want. No one talks to each other.

There is a passage in the book when Marcus whines, "We have been here so long without reaching out to anyone that everyone on the block has probably already made up their mind about us. They probably think we are the worst kind of white people."

A straightforward view of how terrible white people can be doesn't interest me, perhaps because I deal with gentrification in my own neighborhood. However, I wondered about daughter Grace. What will happen when her innocence ends? She will have been raised like Penelope, with a detached mother and over-involved father. Will the rest follow? Drinking and meaningless sex and failure? Or does white privilege have transactional properties that make it so Grace won't have to suffer like Penelope? Writer Joan Didion once talked about all the lights turning green for her. Will Grace have that same expectation of a charmed life?

The uncomfortable truth of Hasley Street is that maternal detachment is far worse than gentrification because maternal detachment is the detachment of a tree with roots. Those roots have flowers and those flowers rot. Adult daughters retain what their mothers did to them, what was said, unsaid, and what cannot be forgotten.

This review first ran in the January 28, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.