A Good Neighborhood
“The planet was dying while people fought over things like who was most American--or who was American at all.”
“It’s in the telling of a tragedy that we sow the seeds--we hope--of prevention of future sorrows.”
The town of Oak Knoll, North Carolina, is a tight-knit community where nothing goes unnoticed and everyone knows everyone. So when the wealthy, white Whitman’s move in, a sense of unease hits next-door neighbor Valerie, especially when Brad Whitman threatens to tamper with her beloved landscape. As passive-aggressive tensions rise between Valerie and Brad, another kind of tension brews between their children. Xavier, Valerie’s son, and Juniper, Brad’s stepdaughter, start to become more than friends, a development that ends with Brad showing his true colors and shatters Xavier’s dreams of a bright future. A thought-provoking page-turner with a not-so-happy ending, A Good Neighborhood will remind you that nice white people may not actually be as nice as you think they are.
I enjoyed this novel, and I think it is an important and timely story that—if you’ve been living under a rock—would open your eyes to the injustices that exist in our country and the tragedies that result from them. With that being said, I know the importance of own voices, so I was a little leary to read a novel about race and class authored by a white woman. Right off the bat, however, she claims to have done her homework in order to write about such topics as “activism in our troubled and troubling times.” I was conscious of this throughout and tried to read with a critical lens. I thought she did an okay job, but after reading some critiques of this novel, I better understood how Fowler didn’t quite do enough homework in terms of her portrayal of her Black characters and representation of the realities of racism in America. See Kiley Reid’s review in The New York Times for more on that. It is also interesting to me how all of the accolades on the back cover were written by white women. If you’re going to tackle racism and portray characters whose racial identity differs from your own, perhaps some advance praise from writers of color is warranted in the blurbs as well.
Here are a few books by authors of color that deal with similar issues as those presented in A Good Neighborhood:
Such a Fun Age - Kiley Reid
The Vanishing Half - Brit Bennett
Little Fires Everywhere - Celeste Ng
To recap, I liked this book, but I am now a little more critical of it than I would have been had I not done some research. I’m learning to be a more informed, critical reader, and it is really eye-opening. BUT, I will say A Good Neighborhood was fun to read while actually moving to a new neighborhood! I’ve never had a front porch before, so this is exciting stuff over here! :)
RATING: 3 out of 5 Stars
Outfit Deets - SPANX Moto Leggings; Golden Goose Sneaks; Sweater is old but Target; Sunnies are new and Target but I can’t find the link because I’m an amateur—these look similar though!
Happy Reading!
-Amy-
