• Author: Joyce Carol Oates
• ISBN: 9780061125645
• Format: paper
• Start: 2024-10-19
• Finish: 2024-10-27

This book is not good. It’s supposedly about the relationship between two college freshman roommates, one who is Black and one who is white. Instead it is about the white character’s obsession with her roommate (because she is Black and different!) and her own processing of her privileged upbringing and her relationship with her radical activist father. This feels like the author set out to write a book about racism that just comes across as racist because of some of the descriptions of the Black character, the narrator’s obsession with her, and the fact that she is actually pretty irrelevant apart from being a catalyst for the white character’s personal growth. I struggled through this hoping it would get better, but it never did.