We Rip the World Apart
A Novel
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A sweeping multi-generational story about motherhood, race and secrets in the lives of three women, perfect for readers of Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half and David Chariandy’s Brother
When 24-year-old Kareela discovers she’s pregnant with a child she isn’t sure she wants, it amplifies her struggle to understand her place in the world as a woman who is half-Black and half-white, yet feels neither.
Her mother, Evelyn, fled to Canada with her husband and their first-born child, Antony, during the politically charged Jamaican Exodus of the 1980s, only to realize they’d come to a place where Black men are viewed with suspicion—a constant and pernicious reality Evelyn watches her husband and son navigate daily.
Years later, in the aftermath of Antony’s murder by the police, Evelyn’s mother-in-law, Violet, moves in, offering young Kareela a link to the Jamaican heritage she has never fully known. Despite Violet’s efforts to help them through their grief, the traumas they carry grow into a web of secrets that threatens the very family they all hold so dear.
Back in the present, Kareela, prompted by fear and uncertainty about the new life she carries, must come to terms with the mysteries surrounding her family’s past and the need to make sense of both her identity and her future.
Weaving the women’s stories across multiple timelines, We Rip the World Apart reveals the ways that simple choices, made in the heat of the moment and with the best of intentions, can have deeper repercussions than could ever have been imagined, especially when people remain silent.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Carr (Hold My Girl) spotlights a woman torn between activism and self-preservation in this complex family saga. Kareela Jackson, a 24-year-old biracial social worker in Halifax, Nova Scotia, remains scarred by the death of her older brother, Antony, 18 years earlier. An outspoken critic of the police, he was shot by cops in Toronto under murky circumstances that were deemed justified. The siblings' parents—Evelyn, a white woman, and Kingsley, a Jamaican man—reacted differently to their loss; Evelyn initially neglected Kareela before becoming overprotective, while Kingsley fell into depression. Now, galvanized by increased attention on racist police violence, Kareela joins the Black Lives Matter movement and gives a speech about what happened to her brother. Meanwhile, she learns she's unexpectedly pregnant by her white boyfriend, Thomas, and questions whether she wants to keep the baby. Thomas, excited to become a father, is upset by her ambivalence, which stems from how her own mother treated her. Kareela's struggles to decide whether to become a parent, an activist, or both alternate with illuminating flashbacks from Evelyn's perspective about being part of a mixed family and her evolving relationship with Kingsley. Carr shrewdly avoids pat resolutions of these fraught interpersonal dynamics, resulting in a satisfying and sophisticated tale.
