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I wanted to like this book, I really did. But from the first few pages onward I knew the protagonist was going to be very unlikeable to me and possibly borderline offensive. (Borderline is an understatement).

I find it odd that throughout this book, Black and biracial male characters are presented as complex and whole characters. Meanwhile, black female characters besides the protagonist are consistently flat and at the margins. The way it written left me with the impression that Jane (and possibly the author) do not engage with the Black women around them or see them as full people worthy of character exploration.

Ex: the protagonist’s automatic assumption that a baby was adopted directly from Africa just because she was dark skinned. (The baby could have been American and even multiracial too, since phenotype doesn’t show your racial makeup). She sizes up Layla, the TV directors assistant, and instantly deems her a “Nigerian princess/Valley girl��. (It’s left up to interpretation whether the protagonist comes up with this based on her being dark skinned). And of course, the two adult black women who are mentioned in passing but not engaged with at all are “Black lesbians�� who live in the neighborhood she aspires to. (Was this for diversity’s sake, or because she can’t fathom that a black man and woman could be married and successful?) Lastly, she barely notices when her own daughter is healing from racial trauma and choosing to play with black baby doll she bought her.

Members of a book club I’m in did make me see that the book was written satirically, but I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t the target audience for this book. And that’s okay! As a black woman who has multiracial family members in every generation from my parents to 2x great grandparents, I don’t enjoy the “woe is me, I have racial trauma from being biracial�� tone of the whole book.

At one point, a character mentions to the protagonist “did you know mixed people have been around since the beginning of time?�� My instant thoughts were 1. Duh and 2. Maybe this book wasn’t written for people who have engaged with “mixedness�� on further levels than the “toxic�� post-loving generation pairing of Black men + white women.

It pushes a flattened view of what it means to be “mulatto�� and completely ignores the way blackness and “mulatto-ness�� have interacted since the beginnings of America. In her quest to prove that biracial people have always been some special class of people in America, she erases the generations of biracial people who acknowledged their mixed lineage but also were fully engaged with their multiracial/Black families and communities.


Felt half-baked and I didn’t enjoy it.