book review: Substitute Me

Hey, let’s talk about something that’s not about adopting teens! Except I’m actually still going to be referring to our situation, because as our focus has shifted from being an interracial same-sex couple hoping to adopt a black or black/multiracial child to a same-sex couple matched with a white teenager with another waiting in the wings and part of our family of choice, I’m thinking about all things racial very differently. Because of the way the laws work in our state now, we had to choose which one of us would be the legal parent and we chose Lee. That means that if all goes well she’ll be a black woman transracially adopting a white boy. That’s very different from the standard narratives of transracial adoption and it’s a complexity we have to think about and talk about a lot still.

So anyway, that’s the baggage I’m bringing into reading a new book that’s being released today, Lori L. Tharps‘s first novel, Substitute Me. N.B. I won my copy of the book from the author’s blog, though I’d bought and really enjoyed her previous book, the memoir Kinky Gazpacho, to the point where I bought Lee the shirt featuring that title so she could wear it proudly in Gazpacholand.

At any rate, the way our story connects with the story of Substitute Me is by way of black caretakers for white children. (Tharps capitalizes both racial terms throughout the book; I’ve chosen to capitalize neither here.) Protagonist Zora is, like me, 30 and a bit aimless. She’s dropped out of college but gone to culinary school, been an au pair in Paris but then moved back to her hometown, Ann Arbor. Now she’s moved to New York City and, lacking other options, decides to take a job as a nanny for a little boy. She is black; the boy and his parents are white. This matters. It matters in terms of her self-image and how she thinks others view her, in how her employers think of her and think of themselves as racialized people. And it matters in the specific ways the relationships between the three adults change, evolve, break down over the course of the story.

I realized when reading it that I haven’t talked to Lee about what she’d do if people thought she was a hired caretaker for her own child. Given that we’re talking teens rather than babies and that nannies are not common in our neck of the woods anyway, I do think it’s more likely that people will guess she’s a stepparent. I don’t think she’s brought any racial discomfort into the idea of being a black woman caring for white children in a country where that dynamic has usually involved a vast power/privilege/economic differential, since that won’t really be the case for us. But reading this book made me approach the issue more thoughtfully so that I’ll be more aware of any comments we might get down the line.

All this and I still haven’t reviewed the book, have I? I enjoyed it! It’s clearly a first novel, a bit creaky in parts and not the kind of polished prose that I like best, but for beach reading or to listen to on a commute it would be perfect. It’s rare (in my perhaps too-limited experience) to read the much-maligned frothy women’s literature and get any deep discussion of race relations and power dynamics. I wish the characters in this book had gone even deeper, but they did have insights into their lives, did change and grow. I know it sounds like I’m very tepid about this, but what I’m saying is that for what it is it’s very good in the ways that matter to me. If you read here, you might like it too. If you don’t read here because I’m so needlessly wordy, you’re probably even more likely to enjoy it but will never find out thanks to the whole not-reading-here thing.

I’d actually like to give the book a reread, especially once people online start talking about it. I think it’s a great jumping-off point for discussions about women and work, who does what in a relationship, how discomfort with racial stereotypes can me ignoring rather than confronting them, the difficulties in employer-employee friendship (and if such a think is even possible), what makes a relationship strong and keeps it healthy. I enjoyed reading it, as I said, but I think it would be even more fun to use it as a way to get to the things about it I find more interesting than the workings of the plot, and I’m grateful that I and others will have it for that.

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