Sharif is a good person. He knows that he is good because he's aware of the privilege that he holds as a white man. He knows he is good because he chose to be a social worker at a nonprofit in Brooklyn, scraping by in New York City. And he knows he is good because his wife, Adjoua, a progressive Black novelist, has always said so. But Sharif's goodness doesn't protect him and Adjoua against bad luck. In an emergency, when they must find a new home for Judy, their beloved, unruly, giant dog before the imminent birth of their immunocompromised daughter, a desperate Sharif leaves Judy in the care of Emmanuel, an undocumented Haitian immigrant Sharif met through his social services nonprofit. When Emmanuel agrees to take the dog, it is only a momentary relief. What begins as a dispute between the young couple and Emmanuel's teenage son soon draws both families into a maelstrom of unpredictable conflict. As tempers flare into a public uproar, escalating to social media and being taken up by law enforcement, the cracks in Sharif and Adjoua's marriage are exposed. The couple is forced to confront everything they thought they knew about race and empathy.
This is storytelling as anxiety dream, a bruising conflagration where best-laid plans meet worst-case scenarios again and again. Thankfully, it’s also a great, galloping read, pointed and provocative; the kind of book you might call a good bad time ... Dimechkie, a nimble social satirist and crack observer of the masks that people wear, is cutting but not unkind to his polyglot cast of characters ... The culmination comes in the final pages of the novel, which introduce a neat, startling twist, though its sleight of hand also bears the sticky fingerprints of authorial intent.
There is so much stress and discomfort in this book, which is also its strength, making the reader complicit in assumptions before blowing them out of the water. It would make a great book discussion book.
Tense ... Dimechkie’s morality tale asks tough questions about the role of self-interest in conflicts fueled by class and race divisions. It’s sure to start conversations.
