Your Face in Mine: A Novel

This is a novel about society and how we perceive race, gender, whatever makes us different. As a person with a close relative who is trans-gender, I thought this book would be interesting. Instead, I found it to be difficult to follow and lost interest. Here's the basics of what it's about. The narrator had lived in China and married a Chinese national. The author, in the voice of the main character commented that Caucasians could never become citizens of China and that you have to look Chinese to be a citizen. This, of course, is a statement of racial profiling, but I digress. The narrator and his wife Wendy move back to the US and have a child but both Wendy and the child die in a tragic car accident. The story actually starts a couple of years after this event when Kelly (I think that's his name), moves back to the city where he finished high school, Baltimore. Late one night he recognizes an old school friend except the friend who was once a skinny, white Jewish kid is now a muscular, Christian black man, Martin. Martin wants Kelly to tell his story about racial reassignment surgery. He relates it to being transgender, born the wrong sex only he was born the wrong race.

It sounded interesting and perhaps, if I could force myself to read past the first half of the book, it is. However, the book is written without quotation marks for dialog and changes from "I said it's purple" to back and forth dialog. I can't keep track of who says what. I find myself reading the same pages over and over trying to get a grip on who is who and to understand the characters. The story also jumps around in time a lot but doesn't bother to tell you that you are reading about a time 6 months ago. For me, this is too frustrating to continue.

Still, I give this three stars. For the parts I've read, the subject matter seems well researched. It is reminiscent of a book I had to read as assigned reading about a community of people who had developed the ability to photosynthesize energy from the sun but had green skin as a side effect. I could easily see this become required reading for an entry level sociology class because it does make you think about the differences that still exist today between people of different races in the US.