A study of unrequited love, of a dysfunctional family, of racial distance, and politics. It was good but somehow the Meade family and the Swift family seemed over the top, or unbelievable. ( )

This book should actually be titled "White Girl and Her Daddy Issues (oh and There's a Black Girl Who's Mostly Irrelevant To The Story)"; and that is the crux of my issues with this book. The title, the blurb, the media accolades all suggest that this book is about the contrast in lives of the white girl and the black girl in 1970s America. I expected an intelligent discourse on race, and I think the author really missed an opportunity here to write about post-Civil Rights America.

In actuality this book is about the white girl's relationship with her radical lawyer father (the white character even confesses this at the end of the book). The black girl is merely a tool to explore this relationship rather than an active participant in the story, which is the book's greatest flaw. The main black character has no active voice (the book is entirely from the POV of the white girl), and is even unwilling to speak to the main white character. The black girl barely has a full sentence to say in the entire book, and her speech is reduced to a bunch of "scuse mes"!

Regardless of the race of the characters, one simply cannot write a book that claims to explore the relationship between two people if one of them is built in such a way that she barely acknowledges the existence of the other! ( )

'Scuse me! Were there any current radicals seeing themselves in a new light when they read this book? Guess that might explain the reviews then. ( )

This is not my favorite JCO book. While a very interesting topic (racial relations on college campus in mid seventies) which made me think, I just didn't find that this book pulling me in like others by the author. Wish I could be more positive. ( )

Black Girl / White Girl tells the story of Genna Hewett-Mead who is reflecting on a traumatic event in her past. Fifteen years ago, in 1975 while attending an exclusive women’s liberal arts college near Philadelphia, her roommate Minette Swift died a mysterious and violent death. Minette was a scholarship student and one of the few African American women to be let into the college. Genna, a quiet woman of privilege got to witness the effects of racism first hand as the racist harassment escalated from vicious slurs to something far worse. However whoever was responsible for this murder still remains a mystery to this day. I had never read Joyce Carol Oates before and I thought this may be my chance to experience her writing. The premise of this novel intrigued me and I was looking forward to uncovering the mystery at play. However, this turned out to be a novel about reflecting on the changing times; I was interested in learning about racism within America during the time of civil rights movements but this focused too much on Genna.

I understand that Joyce Carol Oates may not want to write a novel from the perspective of a person of colour, since she is Caucasian and probably could not do the situation any justice. Rather she took on the perspective of a woman of privilege experiencing the issue first hand. This may have made the book a little more autobiographical and allowed Oates to still explore the issue of racism. While I enjoyed this book, I did not find anything special about it. Maybe this was not the best example of Joyce Carol Oates’ writing but I will try more of her novels in the future.

This review originally appeared on my blog; http://www.knowledgelost.org/literature/book-reviews/genre/historical-fiction/au... ( )