Starred review from November 1, 2018
It takes place in a morning; it covers a lifetime. Short, vivid chapters, like puzzle pieces, deliver the thoughts of a woman sprawled on the pavement, bleeding. She has just dropped off her three daughters at school and returned to her home in an Atlanta suburb. Born in North Carolina, this American of Bengali descent is nonetheless asked repeatedly where she is from because her skin is brown. She has faced discrimination, cruelty, and stupidity in routine circumstances and as a newspaper reporter. A policeman pulls her over day after day for phony traffic violations; a visit to the dry cleaner turns into a vicious confrontation. Her brown girls are harassed, even assaulted at school. Her white husband is perpetually away on business, unaware of his family's suffering. Now heavily armed government agents are searching her house; one has shot her, and no one is helping. A valiant woman of wit and irony, she thinks about Barbie dolls, her grandmothers, her beloved rescue dog, the mistreatment of a black classmate. Not only does Laskar bring her honed skills as a poet and journalist to her pulse-racing first novel about otherness and prejudice, she also draws on her own experience of a shocking raid on her home. Laskar's bravura drama of one woman pushed to the brink by racism is at once sharply relevant and tragically timeless.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)