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Book Reviewed by:An award-winning writer delivers a poignant and provocative novel of identity, race and the search for belonging in the age of globalization.
One afternoon, not long after Kelly Thorndike has moved back to his hometown of Baltimore, an African American man he doesn't recognize calls out to him. To Kelly's shock, the man identifies himself as Martin, who was one of Kelly's closest friends in high school and, before his disappearance nearly twenty years before, skinny, white, and Jewish. Martin then tells an astonishing story: After years of immersing himself in black culture, he's had a plastic surgeon perform - "racial reassignment surgery" - altering his hair, skin, and physiognomy to allow him to pass as African American. Unknown to his family or childhood friends, Martin has been living a new life ever since.
Now, however, Martin feels he can no longer keep his new identity a secret; he wants Kelly to help him ignite a controversy that will help sell racial reassignment surgery to the world. Kelly, still recovering from the death of his wife and child and looking for a way to begin anew, agrees, and things quickly begin to spiral out of control.
Inventive and thought-provoking, Your Face in Mine is a brilliant novel about cultural and racial alienation and the nature of belonging in a world where identity can be a stigma or a lucrative brand.
The beautifully controlled language helps keep a fairly outlandish plot seem entirely plausible, but in the end what truly grounds readers in the world we know is the smaller story beneath the larger one: the story of childhood friends, how they change us, and what becomes of them...continued
Full Review
(725 words)
(Reviewed by Morgan Macgregor).
"Baltimore is warm but pleasant...I belong here, where everything is civilized and gay and rotted and polite."― F. Scott Fitzgerald
When one thinks of literature and American cities, Baltimore may not immediately come to mind. While "Charm City" might not have the apparent prestige of San Francisco or New York, Baltimore's literary history is a long and rich one.
H. L. Mencken, Ogden Nash, Emily Post, Dashiell Hammett, Adrienne Rich, James M. Cain, Upton Sinclair, and Gertrude Stein (among many others) all lived and wrote for a time in Baltimore. The city played a major role in the lives of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, perhaps the Jazz Age's most famous couple, with F. Scott penning Tender Is The Night, there. Russell Baker ...
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