When I saw this title at Target, I immediately grabbed it, read the opening lines, and added it to my to-read list. A town full of people suddenly starting to all turn black one day? I wanna see where he goes with this. Yet, with all that potential, all the doors you open up to yourself with that concept, he instead whittled it down to a pretty personal story about a man and a woman and their parents.
To me, this felt like the sort of thing the one guy in my writing class in college would write as a short story, only randomly lengthened to a short novel. (And by short, I mean short; we’re talking under 200 pages) It’s as if somebody, such as his editor, told him he should grapple with the wider ramifications of this blackening of the town and he tossed in a little here and there about the trouble it was causing to appease them.
Because that’s all we get, really: whispers. Aside from the armed white mob that tries to push out the ones who’ve changed, only whispers. We get more personal looks into the effects it has on people, with the mother of one of our main characters being extremely fearful of it all, and our other main character struggling mightily to deal with the change when it occurs to him, but it rarely stretches far past surface-level observation type stuff. You keep thinking a lightbulb’s about to come on and the author or his characters are about to get something thanks to their situation, but it never quite crystallizes.
On another note, I couldn’t help but wonder what this would mean for the folks who weren’t white or black. I wanted to see if other minorities would consider this a lateral move or if they felt it had sent them on an upwards or downwards trajectory. What about the ramifications for people who were white, but already minorities, such as women, or people on the LGBTQIA spectrum? When our female main character changes, very little time is devoted to it in comparison to the male main character’s plight, and that felt unfair to me.
Except that’s only one of the many things left untouched by this story. Like with the movie Yesterday, the author came up with a stellar idea that would have a far-reaching impact… only to half-ass that in favor of a traditional love (and family) story. This is what I get for buying into books based almost entirely upon concept, I guess.