Loving day

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"Warren Duffy has returned to America for all the worst reasons: his marriage to a beautiful Welsh woman has come apart; his comic shop in Cardiff has failed; and his Irish-American father has died, bequeathing to Warren his last possession, a roofless, half-renovated mansion in the heart of black Philadelphia. On his first night in his new home, Warren spies two figures in the grass outside; when he screws up the nerve to confront them, they disappear. The next day he encounters ghosts of a different kind: in the face of the teenage girl he meets at a comics convention he sees the mingled features of his white father and his black mother, both now dead. The girl is his daughter and she thinks she's white. Warren sets off to remake his life with a reluctant daughter he never knew and a haunted house and history he knows too well. In their search for a new life they struggle with an unwanted house and its ghosts, fall in with a utopian mixed-race cult, and inspire a riot on Loving Day, the unsung holiday that celebrates interracial love"--Publisher.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Great exploration of race & identity, but I didn't buy into the characters submitted by Susan4Pax -prev. sueij- on July 21, 2018, 12:06am I heard about this book on NPR, and couldn't wait to get my hands on it. With its deep dive into questions of identity, parenting, history, and Philadelphia, along with a slew of great reviews, this looked right up my alley. In the end, I was not impressed.

I did love that Johnson deeply takes on issues of race and identity. The main character is a man with an Irish father and Black mother who is very fair skinned and identifies as Black. He turns out to have a daughter who is darker than he is, but who was raised Jewish and identifies as White. This creates all kinds of space to explore questions of race and identity (as defined by self, family, community, and outsiders). Johnson also gave some historical and Philly context that was nice to see in a fictional work.

But the story was disjointed and convoluted in ways that were distracting. I never found Warren Duffy to be a completely convincing character. I didn't find his actions or his growth to be believable. I didn't find the actions of the people around him to be logical or likely. Because of these things, I could never fully immerse in the book, and never enjoy myself. 2/5 stars.

i like this boo, submitted by Zaneeba on June 24, 2019, 7:48am cool this si a game code:justkidding