What's Mine and Yours
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- 3,99 €
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- 3,99 €
Publisher Description
'What's Mine and Yours is a book about parents who try and fail and then try again. An extraordinary cast of characters, nuanced and full of insight. Read this book.' -ANGIE CRUZ, author of Dominicana
In the Piedmont of North Carolina, two families' paths become unexpectedly intertwined over twenty years. Jade and Lacey May are two mothers determined to give their children the opportunities they never had. After a harrowing loss, Jade wants to hand down the tools her son, Gee, will need to survive in America as a sensitive young Black man.
Meanwhile, Lacey May, having left the husband she loves, strives to protect her three half-Latina daughters from their charming father's influence. When a county initiative draws students from the largely Black east side of town into a predominantly white high school on the west, each mother stands on different sides of the integration debate. Gee meets Lacey May's daughter Noelle during the school play, and their families begin to form deeply knotted, messy ties that will shape the trajectory of their adult lives. And their mothers make choices that will haunt them for decades to come.
What's Mine and Yours is an expansive yet intimate multigenerational tapestry of motherhood, identity, and the legacies we inherit. It explores the unique organism that is every family: what breaks them apart and how they come back together.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Coster (Halsey Street) returns with a rich if diffuse story of loss, betrayal, and systemic racism, centered on two families spanning the 1990s to the present, set mainly in the Piedmont area of North Carolina. In 1992, six-year-old Gee's, father, Ray, gets killed in front of him. Noelle Ventura grows up on the other side of town, and though her father, Robbie, is from Colombia, she passes for white. In 2002, the two families intersect when Gee, who is Black, is bussed to Noelle's high school. Her white mother, Lacey May, who struggled to support three children while Robbie was in jail, joins a group of parents who protest the school's integration, a racist position that forces Noelle to choose between Lacey May and her growing love for Gee. In a series of abrupt shifts, Coster portrays Noelle as a housewife in 2018 Atlanta, and her Black husband, Nelson, who works as a photographer in 2018 Paris and sleeps with a white woman. In 2018, Lacey May's daughters reluctantly return home to visit after hearing she has cancer, setting off a series of confrontations and reconciliations. While Coster's exploration of race is powerful, the scattered plotting dampens the impact of the various stories. It's undoubtedly ambitious, but it doesn't hang together.