Ms. Greenidge has charted an ambitious course for a book that begins so mock-innocently. And she lets the suspicion and outrage mount as the Freemans’ true situation unfolds. This author is also a historian, and she makes the 1929' on Toneybee plaque tell another, equally gripping story that strongly parallels the Freemans’ 1990 experience. A question that hovers over this book is whether the Freemans will learn from past horrors or become so dysfunctional that they merely relive them.
Given such potentially heavy-handed material, it’s to Greenidge’s great credit that she nonetheless manages to craft a full and sensitive portrait of an all-American family ... Greenridge has spun a touching and soulful story of race and inheritance and facing up to difference.
...a lot to pack into a novel, but Greenidge succeeds in large part because her voices are so dead-on. Whether it is Charlotte, swooning and conflicted over Adria or her sister, or Nymphadora trying to be clear-eyed about Gardner, these narratives are convincing and utterly engaging. Even little sister Callie’s chapters follow their own crazy logic, all of which lead up to a perhaps inevitable present in which so much is still left unsaid.
Greenidge seamlessly weaves together the two plots, which culminate in a rich examination of America’s treatment of race, and the ways we attempt to discuss and confront it today.
Greenidge tells each of these segments individually, through a series of sections devoted to each person. Some of these sections are told through first-person and some are told through third-person, the vacillation of which can be jarring and seems slightly arbitrary, but through each perspective, the story is moved along. With this writing style occasionally comes the problem of some plot points being dropped at the end of the section and then never picked up again, or being watered down or jumped forward when they are picked up again ... While some of the transitions are bumpy, Greenidge has the gift of surprising, unique prose. Her voice is utterly refreshing. Each of her characters is richly different and fleshed out within the sections, and there is nothing interchangeable about any of them, which is a feat few debut authors can master ... It is so uniquely human and tells a different story that we must also learn and know: that different degrees of racism are still racism, that some of it is hidden and prettied-up but still breathes.
Ms. Greenidge drops the reader into the uncomfortable labyrinth of identity, history and race with an unflinching, yet compassionate eye ... Ms. Greenidge does a masterful job exposing the toxicity of racism; the Freemans and Nymphadora encounter the paradoxically subtle, yet in their face, multiple heads of this ever present beast ... a remarkable contribution in the struggle to find truthful and humane language to communicate about the power of racism and its dehumanizing impact.
While the novel would benefit from stronger characterizations of Charles and Laurel, Greenidge pulls together the multiple story lines and strong perspectives of Charlotte and Nymphadora with her descriptive powers, lively dialogue and a fluid, engaging style. With this ambitious, compelling novel, she brings an original and thoughtful voice to the exploration of the complexities and ambiguities of race and gender, what it means to be a family, the relationship between humans and wild animals in domestic settings and the failures of communication across cultures and species.
Greenidge deftly handles a host of complex themes and characters, exploring not just how (literally) institutionalized racism is, but the difficulty of an effective response to it ... For all the seriousness of its themes, though, Charlie Freeman is also caustically funny. Greenidge understands the inherent absurdity in the close attachments everyone has with Charlie, either as a proxy child or a political football.
It’s hard to recall a first novel since Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist that discourses so incisively or inventively on the daily reminders of exclusion and 'otherness' inherent to W.E.B. DuBois’s notion of double-consciousness—the sense of being both American and black, nominally in and systemically out, at the same time. Greenidge does a masterful job of conveying the pronounced and peculiar feeling of dislocation in situations where a sense of wrongness manifests over time.
