sweetnovember's review against another edition
I thought this would be a great book to read. The concept sounded very interesting, racial reassignment. However, the narrator just drone on and on about nothing in particular and I really did have time for that. It was too slow paced of a book.
little_worm's review against another edition
2.0
The blurb for this caught me because of a trend that's been growing over at tumblr. There are the furkin, who believe that they are animals (typically wolves) trapped in the body of humans, the otherkin that play the same game but with supernatural creatures such as vampires and werewolves, and even fictionkin that develop perhaps too strong an attachment to their favourite fictional characters.
Among this club there is another group; the transracial or transethnic -- those that believe they've been born into the wrong race. Typically this is a sentiment expressed among extreme Japanophiles, but it's a concept I've not seen explored in literature too frequently, and so I was pretty excited when I received an advance copy of Your Face in Mine to review.
Kelly Thorndike has moved back to Baltimore following the tragic death of his wife and daughter, and just by chance one day bumps into Martin, an old friend from his childhood. Except this is not the Martin Lipkin that he remembers as a pale slim Jewish boy, this is now Martin Wilkinson - African American.
Martin recruits Kelly to follow his story, to help him launch it to the wider world and to bring Racial Transitioning to a global conciousness, to be the one to break the story. Having recently lost his public radio station due to lack of followership, Kelly rides along with this and ultimately.
It's an interesting premise, but I feel the execution is what lets this novel down. For a novel that is entirely about race, it only touched on the subject of what it means to be black in America, or to become a part of the minority from a position of privilege and power. It's interesting to read accounts from women following their MtF transition and learn how this change impacts upon their daily life, but Martin only mentions, very offhandedly, perhaps two or three incidents about this challenge within the entire book.
There's a lot of what feels like filler -- in the early stages of the story a great deal is given to the radio station Kelly works for, seeming to no constructive end until perhaps within the final thirty pages or so
One of the main transformations within the novel comes within the final fifty or so pages
It felt like such a terrible decision, and one that was made by someone still in the throes of grief, given that Kelly still speaks and converses with his dead wife in the early stages of the novel, and and irreversible one that he would come to regret within a couple of years.
Despite this being a novel that crosses race and boarders the characters had no distinct voice. This was particularly challenging given Row's decision to not use quotation marks, and there were a number of chapters featuring multiple speakers, sometimes in the region of 4-5, with very little to indicate who was saying what. This combined with long passages about the history of Baltimore, business, politics, all packed to the brim with jargon and unnecessary details, made for a very difficult read.
I half wonder if part of this was intentional, if Row meant to leave us unsure of who was saying what, to peel away these boundaries in the same way he was doing so with race -- these people have the same voices because in essence they are all the same. Only, it doesn't make for particularly enjoyable or engaging reading.
There were some spots in there that did shine though, notable the passages relating to Martin and Kelly's childhood and their history with Alan, and these sections were definitely much more engaging and leant more to character development. I only with they weren't so far and few between.
I was provided this copy as an ARC for which I am very grateful, but if you'd like to check it out for yourself Your Face in Mine is out August 14th from Riverhead Books.
Among this club there is another group; the transracial or transethnic -- those that believe they've been born into the wrong race. Typically this is a sentiment expressed among extreme Japanophiles, but it's a concept I've not seen explored in literature too frequently, and so I was pretty excited when I received an advance copy of Your Face in Mine to review.
Kelly Thorndike has moved back to Baltimore following the tragic death of his wife and daughter, and just by chance one day bumps into Martin, an old friend from his childhood. Except this is not the Martin Lipkin that he remembers as a pale slim Jewish boy, this is now Martin Wilkinson - African American.
Martin recruits Kelly to follow his story, to help him launch it to the wider world and to bring Racial Transitioning to a global conciousness, to be the one to break the story. Having recently lost his public radio station due to lack of followership, Kelly rides along with this and ultimately
Spoiler
goes through with the procedure himself, going from American to ChineseIt's an interesting premise, but I feel the execution is what lets this novel down. For a novel that is entirely about race, it only touched on the subject of what it means to be black in America, or to become a part of the minority from a position of privilege and power. It's interesting to read accounts from women following their MtF transition and learn how this change impacts upon their daily life, but Martin only mentions, very offhandedly, perhaps two or three incidents about this challenge within the entire book.
There's a lot of what feels like filler -- in the early stages of the story a great deal is given to the radio station Kelly works for, seeming to no constructive end until perhaps within the final thirty pages or so
Spoiler
during which he is confronted by Mort, an ex-employee, about his links to Martin, and the company which is a shell of sorts for this racial surgery. The encounter seems to deflate very quickly though, with Kelly simply walking out of the conversation and simply negating any conflict there may have been.One of the main transformations within the novel comes within the final fifty or so pages
Spoiler
when Kelly learns that he was invited to cover Martin's own transformation, to travel with him to Thailand, was simply a ruse to persuade him to go through the procedure himself and become Chinese. Kelly accepts this within a couple of pages or so. Kelly has spent time studying and working in China and this was where he met his wife, Wendy. The only indication though the entire 300 or so pages up to this point is a brief moment in which, following the loss of their daughter and granddaughter, Wendy's parents ask Kelly to stay with them. He declines because, being white, he is always going to be a foreigner and outsider within their community. It's a short exchange, and nothing that would lend credence to Kelly's easy and swift acceptance - the agrees to the procedure and it is started the following day!It felt like such a terrible decision, and one that was made by someone still in the throes of grief, given that Kelly still speaks and converses with his dead wife in the early stages of the novel, and and irreversible one that he would come to regret within a couple of years.
Despite this being a novel that crosses race and boarders the characters had no distinct voice. This was particularly challenging given Row's decision to not use quotation marks, and there were a number of chapters featuring multiple speakers, sometimes in the region of 4-5, with very little to indicate who was saying what. This combined with long passages about the history of Baltimore, business, politics, all packed to the brim with jargon and unnecessary details, made for a very difficult read.
I half wonder if part of this was intentional, if Row meant to leave us unsure of who was saying what, to peel away these boundaries in the same way he was doing so with race -- these people have the same voices because in essence they are all the same. Only, it doesn't make for particularly enjoyable or engaging reading.
There were some spots in there that did shine though, notable the passages relating to Martin and Kelly's childhood and their history with Alan, and these sections were definitely much more engaging and leant more to character development. I only with they weren't so far and few between.
I was provided this copy as an ARC for which I am very grateful, but if you'd like to check it out for yourself Your Face in Mine is out August 14th from Riverhead Books.
lola425's review against another edition
4.0
Interesting concept, good execution. It's only a matter of time before something like Row describes becomes a reality. Just because we can do something technologically, does that mean we should do it? Where and when do morality and ethics come in? Should they?
zacharyfoote's review against another edition
2.0
in my adult life, i’ve never been so naîve as to believe we live in a post-racial society, but the last two months or so, with the events that’ve unfolded about a half-hour’s drive away from the somewhat homogeneous town i live in, confirm we’re even farther away than i thought. for the first two weeks, i kept very close tabs on the situation in ferguson, fascinated in one sense by the righteous anger the community articulated in response to such a blithely racist, unselfcritical institution. and then i felt repulsed at myself, because in spite of all that i just fucking sat there, i sat there and watched feeds into the late night and then i feel asleep and woke up and went to work, where my co-workers said the same blithely racist things about the protestors and belittled their causes from afar. and i said almost nothing at all in response, offered no riposte except a weak rhetorical question here and there, and adopted a thousand-yard stare when someone broached the subject with another one of their self-satisfied Hot Takes. i let guilt and hand-wringing and self-loathing again consume fierce underpinnings of solidarity. by virtue of my relative invisibility and mobility and privilege, i could and did hide my real feelings and still lived without the nagging fear that i might be harassed or debased or extrajudicially murdered at the hands of another person, another person who wields a nominal power, who believes Hard Work gives him baseline license to use it forcefully when he harbors the delusion that those who are less powerful might take it away from him.
it was around this time, when i started taking stock of my concerned whiteboi inaction, that i started your face in mine. i found myself glancing at the photo on the back cover: a studious-looking, kind of burly white dude. intense stare. groomed beard. careful shadow to hide a regressing hairline. could be me in fifteen years. the conceit of jess row’s book hinges on “racial dysphoria,” which sounds like it simultaneously could and couldn’t be a thing. at the book’s outset, our widowed protagonist, kelly, moves back to baltimore from china and runs into his old school friend, martin, in a parking lot. only instead of the jewish kid kelly always knew, the man staring back at him is black.
still here? okay.
martin agrees to explain to kelly the basis for, and the process of, his racial reassignment. in exchange, he wants his old friend, who knows about his life birth assignment and the paradigm-shifting trauma both of them faced, to use his meager journalistic background to frame the narrative into something the public will find more digestible. martin’s taped confessions feel genuine, like a document of a true dysphoria.
it’s weird, however, that row reaches toward gender dysphoria as a one-to-one reference point for his characters’ feelings. it’s weird that he doesn’t examine that in greater depth, that he doesn’t try to pick it apart and study it as he does with other aspects of the idea. still weirder is how his characters, who all seem to have the germ of his own education and “progressiveness,” flippantly use the term “transsexual” (even martin). that notwithstanding, gender and race, it seems to me, are similar constructs, but they aren’t the same. martin (and, perhaps by extension, row) some baseline assumptions made about the possibilities of gender dysphoria to sell his existence to the rest of the world. eventually this leads to an interesting, if muted, running commentary on capital and identity.
that's but an example of the ideas row seems to three-quarter-ass in service to a taut story. row metes out engaging story changes and different perspectives in his dialogue - in fact, the conversations his characters have are often the novel’s high points. kelly’s own traumas are also tenderly written but not overwrought. but by the last 70 pages or so, row tries high-concept and higher tension, and it starts to deflate like a leaky balloon.
it sounds like i’m dumping on this book, but i want to like it. it’s an ambitious idea. but it’s just quite not dense enough, or long enough, or authoritative enough to navigate intersectionality in the ways i want it to. as a white cis dude with progressive pretensions, i want a book like this to straight up flip the table on me instead of offering my own tepid platitudes.
it was around this time, when i started taking stock of my concerned whiteboi inaction, that i started your face in mine. i found myself glancing at the photo on the back cover: a studious-looking, kind of burly white dude. intense stare. groomed beard. careful shadow to hide a regressing hairline. could be me in fifteen years. the conceit of jess row’s book hinges on “racial dysphoria,” which sounds like it simultaneously could and couldn’t be a thing. at the book’s outset, our widowed protagonist, kelly, moves back to baltimore from china and runs into his old school friend, martin, in a parking lot. only instead of the jewish kid kelly always knew, the man staring back at him is black.
still here? okay.
martin agrees to explain to kelly the basis for, and the process of, his racial reassignment. in exchange, he wants his old friend, who knows about his life birth assignment and the paradigm-shifting trauma both of them faced, to use his meager journalistic background to frame the narrative into something the public will find more digestible. martin’s taped confessions feel genuine, like a document of a true dysphoria.
it’s weird, however, that row reaches toward gender dysphoria as a one-to-one reference point for his characters’ feelings. it’s weird that he doesn’t examine that in greater depth, that he doesn’t try to pick it apart and study it as he does with other aspects of the idea. still weirder is how his characters, who all seem to have the germ of his own education and “progressiveness,” flippantly use the term “transsexual” (even martin). that notwithstanding, gender and race, it seems to me, are similar constructs, but they aren’t the same. martin (and, perhaps by extension, row) some baseline assumptions made about the possibilities of gender dysphoria to sell his existence to the rest of the world. eventually this leads to an interesting, if muted, running commentary on capital and identity.
that's but an example of the ideas row seems to three-quarter-ass in service to a taut story. row metes out engaging story changes and different perspectives in his dialogue - in fact, the conversations his characters have are often the novel’s high points. kelly’s own traumas are also tenderly written but not overwrought. but by the last 70 pages or so, row tries high-concept and higher tension, and it starts to deflate like a leaky balloon.
it sounds like i’m dumping on this book, but i want to like it. it’s an ambitious idea. but it’s just quite not dense enough, or long enough, or authoritative enough to navigate intersectionality in the ways i want it to. as a white cis dude with progressive pretensions, i want a book like this to straight up flip the table on me instead of offering my own tepid platitudes.
amyb24's review against another edition
2.0
I thought this book had an interesting premise and treated the topic of race (mostly) thoughtfully and sensitively. My problem was that the plot never really engaged me. I didn't find any of the characters particularly likable and never felt invested in their fates. I also thought some of the reflection on the meaning of race that came early in the book was spoiled by the events of the last third of the book. A thought-provoking read, but not a thrilling one.
hellokeila's review against another edition
3.0
I don’t know I feel about this book. I skipped many pages of what seemed like unnecessary details, I was a bit troubled by the idea of trans-racial operations being written by a white man, and I didn’t really get the point or the end. It wasn’t awful but didn’t feel like a good read either.
katherwills59's review
2.0
I bought this book years ago because of the wild premise. I had even I hauled it already, but I still kind of wanted to see what I would think about it. Well . . . I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the way the characters spoke about race and I COULD NOT STAND how Kelly viewed women. Also, I didn’t like how the idea of Black trauma was framed; we just hear about how it’s so “depressing” to all the white people in Baltimore. Lastly, the narrative structure and the amount of each part of the story we get did not really work for me.
On a lighter note, some of the stuff Martin said about feeling like a Black was laughable, in a “I can’t believe you can say such stupid things with your whole chest” type way.
On a lighter note, some of the stuff Martin said about feeling like a Black was laughable, in a “I can’t believe you can say such stupid things with your whole chest” type way.
melihooker's review against another edition
4.0
I am surprised this book has such a low rating. I suspect maybe it's because it more character driven with a loose plot that doesn't really go anywhere. I hate to say that at the risk of turning people off from this book, because it's brilliant, but it's the truth.
The basic plot is Kelly has an unexpected run in with an old high school friend, but he doesn't realize right away because his old friend, Martin, who was once white is now a Black man.
Martin has undergone racial reassignment.
Based on that you would think it is more social commentary - what is race, what makes you you, what would happen if we could choose our race, etc - and it is, but that comes more in the latter half of the book.
What you get in the first half is predominately about friendship, and friendship lost, love, and love lost, both through the natural progression in life that pulls people apart but also death.
I think I read this book at just the right time because I can't think of a strong thread that pulls the reader through to the end but I was engaged and excited to pick this up every night to get further along. I love Jess Row's writing, and this story is unlike anything I've read. Took a little dip toward the end, so wasn't a perfect read, but one I won't soon forget.
The basic plot is Kelly has an unexpected run in with an old high school friend, but he doesn't realize right away because his old friend, Martin, who was once white is now a Black man.
Martin has undergone racial reassignment.
Based on that you would think it is more social commentary - what is race, what makes you you, what would happen if we could choose our race, etc - and it is, but that comes more in the latter half of the book.
What you get in the first half is predominately about friendship, and friendship lost, love, and love lost, both through the natural progression in life that pulls people apart but also death.
I think I read this book at just the right time because I can't think of a strong thread that pulls the reader through to the end but I was engaged and excited to pick this up every night to get further along. I love Jess Row's writing, and this story is unlike anything I've read. Took a little dip toward the end, so wasn't a perfect read, but one I won't soon forget.
rwcarter's review
2.0
The phrase "racial reassignment" is really what caught my attention with this book. I was excited to explore the concept and see what someone else's fleshed out concept of this process would look like. And honestly, if the book had continued on the trajectory it had for the first 2/3 of the book, I think it would've turned out better.
What is it like to feel that you don't belong to your own race? Firstly, I think Jess Row did a good job not falling into the trap of using white guilt to justify wanting to be black. Martin Wilkinson (nee Lipkin) grew up as "the token white kid". His environment was largely non-white until, in later years, he was forced into a primarily white private school. With a lack of guiding figures (mother deceased, father dealing with his own struggles), Martin was left to define himself alone, without reference. Further, growing up somewhere like Baltimore, which is a town that unfortunately has extremely stark racial divides, it begins to seem reasonable that Martin would feel that he has to "choose" a culture to belong to. It's almost Freudian -- developmentally Martin was ensconced in Black culture. When faced with the cognitive dissonance of a primarily white experience later in life, can we blame him for regression? And I think herein lies the point: Wilkinson didn't want to be black, he wanted to be Black. His was a dissonance of culture, not of skin color. Which I think successfully expands the question of this book beyond a Black/white dichotomy. The question may be, how does it feel to be multicultural? How does it feel to be multicultural as a white man, whose race is associated with colonization? How does it feel to be multicultural as an Asian man/woman? As a Black man/woman? I think Row did a great job capturing this struggle....until around page 200.
If the book ended before Kelly's trip to Bangkok, I would've loved this book. However, as soon as the discussion became about preying on cultural insecurity and turning transracialism into a commodity, I was out. We went from "let's explore the complex implications of a culturally diverse society" to "oh you like Chinese food? We can make you Chinese so that you can make Chinese food better!". What was set up to be potentially profound, ended up being vapid. I kept longing for the book to return to its endearing literary references and woeful yet insightful 'coming-of-age' vibes, but alas we were stuck with business models and unconvincing narratives.
To complete the criticism sandwich, a final thing I enjoyed was the stylistic omission of quotation marks. I think doing this forces the reader to focus more on the story and is quite effective in creating a sort of phenomenological chain that makes the narrative seem more real.
What is it like to feel that you don't belong to your own race? Firstly, I think Jess Row did a good job not falling into the trap of using white guilt to justify wanting to be black. Martin Wilkinson (nee Lipkin) grew up as "the token white kid". His environment was largely non-white until, in later years, he was forced into a primarily white private school. With a lack of guiding figures (mother deceased, father dealing with his own struggles), Martin was left to define himself alone, without reference. Further, growing up somewhere like Baltimore, which is a town that unfortunately has extremely stark racial divides, it begins to seem reasonable that Martin would feel that he has to "choose" a culture to belong to. It's almost Freudian -- developmentally Martin was ensconced in Black culture. When faced with the cognitive dissonance of a primarily white experience later in life, can we blame him for regression? And I think herein lies the point: Wilkinson didn't want to be black, he wanted to be Black. His was a dissonance of culture, not of skin color. Which I think successfully expands the question of this book beyond a Black/white dichotomy. The question may be, how does it feel to be multicultural? How does it feel to be multicultural as a white man, whose race is associated with colonization? How does it feel to be multicultural as an Asian man/woman? As a Black man/woman? I think Row did a great job capturing this struggle....until around page 200.
If the book ended before Kelly's trip to Bangkok, I would've loved this book. However, as soon as the discussion became about preying on cultural insecurity and turning transracialism into a commodity, I was out. We went from "let's explore the complex implications of a culturally diverse society" to "oh you like Chinese food? We can make you Chinese so that you can make Chinese food better!". What was set up to be potentially profound, ended up being vapid. I kept longing for the book to return to its endearing literary references and woeful yet insightful 'coming-of-age' vibes, but alas we were stuck with business models and unconvincing narratives.
To complete the criticism sandwich, a final thing I enjoyed was the stylistic omission of quotation marks. I think doing this forces the reader to focus more on the story and is quite effective in creating a sort of phenomenological chain that makes the narrative seem more real.