What's Mine and Yours
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3.7 • 184 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick!
An instant New York Times bestseller!
A USA Today bestseller!
Named a Best Book of 2021 by Amazon • Esquire • Marie Claire • Refinery29 • Kirkus • Redbook • Ms. Magazine • The Millions • Undomesticated Magazine • Paperback Paris
"A once-every-few-years reading experience."—Mary Beth Keane, New York Times bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes
"Coster portrays her characters’ worlds with startling vitality. As the children fall in lust and love, grapple with angst and battle the tides of New South politics, Coster’s writing shines"—New York Times Book Review
From the author of Halsey Street, a sweeping novel of legacy, identity, the American family—and the ways that race affects even our most intimate relationships.
A community in the Piedmont of North Carolina rises in outrage as a county initiative draws students from the largely Black east side of town into predominantly white high schools on the west. For two students, Gee and Noelle, the integration sets off a chain of events that will tie their two families together in unexpected ways over the next twenty years.
On one side of the integration debate is Jade, Gee's steely, ambitious mother. In the aftermath of a harrowing loss, she is determined to give her son the tools he'll need to survive in America as a sensitive, anxious, young Black man. On the other side is Noelle's headstrong mother, Lacey May, a white woman who refuses to see her half-Latina daughters as anything but white. She strives to protect them as she couldn't protect herself from the influence of their charming but unreliable father, Robbie.
When Gee and Noelle join the school play meant to bridge the divide between new and old students, their paths collide, and their two seemingly disconnected families begin to form deeply knotted, messy ties that will shape the trajectory of their adult lives. And their mothers—each determined to see her child inherit a better life—will make choices that will haunt them for decades to come.
As love is built and lost, and the past never too far behind, What's Mine and Yours is an expansive, vibrant tapestry that moves between the years, from the foothills of North Carolina, to Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Paris. It explores the unique organism that is every family: what breaks them apart and how they come back together.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Naima Coster’s compulsively readable novel is a multigenerational saga that tackles the prickly complexities of race and family loyalty with clarity and enormous compassion. Set in rural North Carolina and Georgia and spanning decades, What’s Mine and Yours follows two sets of kids—three girls who pass as white although their father is a Colombian immigrant and a Black boy who lost his father to violence—through tumultuous childhoods and into adulthood. The novel’s considerable joy stems from watching Coster’s young characters navigate, and often defy, expectations. Fans of The Vanishing Half will devour this sprawling and deeply affecting story.
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.
Customer Reviews
What’s mine & yours
I did not like one single character in this book. It felt seedy & angry, the only redeeming quality was that Diane & Alma found happiness.