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Book Reviewed by:From the celebrated author of Rich and Pretty, a novel about the families we fight to build and those we fight to keep.
Like many first-time mothers, Rebecca Stone finds herself both deeply in love with her newborn son and deeply overwhelmed. Struggling to juggle the demands of motherhood with her own aspirations and feeling utterly alone in the process, she reaches out to the only person at the hospital who offers her any real help - Priscilla Johnson - and begs her to come home with them as her son's nanny.
Priscilla's presence quickly does as much to shake up Rebecca's perception of the world as it does to stabilize her life. Rebecca is white, and Priscilla is black, and through their relationship, Rebecca finds herself confronting, for the first time, the blind spots of her own privilege. She feels profoundly connected to the woman who essentially taught her what it means to be a mother. When Priscilla dies unexpectedly in childbirth, Rebecca steps forward to adopt the baby. But she is unprepared for what it means to be a white mother with a black son. As she soon learns, navigating motherhood for her is a matter of learning how to raise two children whom she loves with equal ferocity, but whom the world is determined to treat differently.
Written with the warmth and psychological acuity that defined his debut, Rumaan Alam has crafted a remarkable novel about the lives we choose, and the lives that are chosen for us.
Alam writes poetically, easily leaving plot and secondary characters as specters hovering in the background and only bringing them to the fore as needed. This is truly Rebecca's story, and what is on the page is largely from her point of view. Quite an accomplishment for a male author, and all in all he pulls it off quite well, depicting a late 20th century woman grappling with society's skein of often conflicting expectations...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Donna Chavez).
The protagonist and her husband in Rumaan Alam's novel That Kind of Mother are a white upper middle-class couple who adopt a black infant. They love and raise him alongside their own biological son, and treat them as brothers. Race plays a key role in almost every aspect of their lives. The story takes place in Washington DC in the late 80s and early 90s, when transracial adoption was uncommon. There is wisdom to be gleaned from both transracial parents who adopt and their adopted children. Here are three points of view on the issue.
In an interview with Natalie Brenner at Adoption.com, a platform for sharing stories and connecting with resources about adoption, Angela Tucker, a nationally-recognized leader on transracial adoption ...
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If you liked That Kind of Mother, try these:
by Danzy Senna
Published 2018
From the bestselling author of Caucasia, a subversive and engrossing novel of race, class and manners in contemporary America.
by Carol Rifka Brunt
Published 2013
In this striking literary debut, Carol Rifka Brunt unfolds a moving story of love, grief, and renewal as two lonely people become the unlikeliest of friends and find that sometimes you don't know you've lost someone until you've found them.
Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere
With his unerring eye for nuance and unsparing sense of irony, Rumaan Alam's second novel is both heartfelt and thought-provoking.
