I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again by Caroline Darian This was an absolutely heartbreaking book. Caroline Darian is the daughter of that man in France who had been drugging his wife unconscious and allowing every Tom Dick and Harry to rape her while she was unconscious. There were some 50 men who were charged in raping her. And they were all totally cool with coming to some guy’s house to get their rocks off with his unconscious wife. What the fuck is wrong with people? This book is all about how Caroline coped with the massive loss of her father and grieving him while he is still alive.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie I absolutely loved this one. It read like a memoir, but it is fiction. It’s the story of a Native American teenager who wants to go to a better high school than the one on the reservation near Spokane, Washington. It’s all about navigating bridging the gap between being Native American and white. In the white world he’s an outsider, especially when they find out that he is literally poverty stricken. On he reservation he is a traitor because he left that world behind to go to a white school. It’s a matter of not belonging where ever you go so you may as well pick the option that is best for you in the long run and hope everyone around you will understand.
Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid Emira is a 25 year old black woman who is babysitting for a white family in Philadelphia. On a particular night she gets called into work, someone vandalized the family’s house in the middle of the night, so Emira leaves a party she’s at to take the 3 year old child to a local supermarket to get her out of the house so she isn’t scared when the police come. While at the market she gets harassed by a white shopper and security guard who are accusing her of kidnapping this white child. A man videos the whole interaction. She tells the man to delete the video, he sends her the only copy, and that’s the end of the video. She goes back to babysitting this white family. The mom, Alix, wants to make things right for Emira and ends up going way overboard to try to overcome the racial barrier between the two of them. But the relationship between Emira and Alix is ultimately transactional, and deep down they both kinda feel gross about that. This story takes us into whether or not you even have to try to compensate for the fact that it’s a white mother who hired a black babysitter, and how they both fail to handle that dynamic.
BJ Knapp is the author of Beside the Music, available for purchase here. Please sign up for the Backstage with BJ Knapp mailing list to get updates on events, signings, dog pictures and so much more.