Your Face in Mine

by Jess Row

An award-winning writer delivers a poignant and provocative novel of identity, race and the search for belonging in the age of globalization.

One afternoon, not long after Kelly Thorndike has moved back to his hometown of Baltimore, an African American man he doesn’t recognize calls out to him. To Kelly’s shock, the man identifies himself as Martin, who was one of Kelly’s closest friends in high school—and, before his disappearance nearly twenty years before, skinny, white, and Jewish. Martin then tells an astonishing story: After years of immersing himself in black culture, he’s had a plastic surgeon perform “racial reassignment surgery”—altering his hair, skin, and physiognomy to allow him to pass as African American. Unknown to his family or childhood friends, Martin has been living a new life ever since.

Now, however, Martin feels he can no longer keep his new identity a secret; he wants Kelly to help him ignite a controversy that will help sell racial reassignment surgery to the world. Kelly, still recovering from the death of his wife and child and looking for a way to begin anew, agrees, and things quickly begin to spiral out of control.

Inventive and thought-provoking, Your Face in Mine is a brilliant novel about cultural and racial alienation and the nature of belonging in a world where identity can be a stigma or a lucrative brand.

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Contemporary, Race, Book Club, Literary Fiction, Literature

372 pages, Hardcover

First published August 14, 2014

About the author

Jess Row is an American short story writer and novelist. He attended Yale University and later taught English in Hong Kong for two years before completing his M.F.A. at the University of Michigan in 2001.

Reviews

[Raya Fagg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Baltimore, Maryland seems to be on my brain lately. First, I binge watched The Wire, then I reread David Simon’s 1997 book The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood. Finally I plunged into Jess Row’s provocative book, Your Face in Mine: A Novel.

For someone who has been “complimented” for being well spoken, learned the useful art of “shifting” for the comfort of myself and others, and have heard that my cries of inequality have been attributed to race instead of the gender politics I navigate, the idea of being able to reassign to a more “fitting” race was interesting to me. Jess Row examines what happens when a person who feels no connection to his OWN ethnic background can change to one he feels more connected with through racial reassignment. Using the same ideas behind gender reassignment, racial reassignment is a reality. Shedding your past, undergoing an intense dialect training, and cosmetic surgery, you too can become a blonde, Asian, Brazilian, or African American.


Kelly Thorndike has returned to his hometown of Baltimore to manage a struggling NPR affiliate, and cope with the death of his wife and daughter. While he tries to regain normalcy in his life, he runs into Martin Wilkinson, a friend from high school who has changed in more ways than one. Martin’s appearance in Kelly’s life brings back memories of Kelly’s high school days, when Kelly, Martin, and their deceased friend Alan were starry-eyed kids, playing in a band, preparing to take on the world. Martin has been always the oddball friend, and now Kelly sees that his oddness was not just a phase, but who Martin really was all along.

I struggled with the book. As a born and raised African American, I felt that somehow I betrayed my people by agreeing with the things Martin Wilkerson said. As I read, my mind kept drawing to the fact that African American Martin Wilkerson was actually Jewish Martin Lipsky and Jess Row was composing the words and thoughts of the man. Martin was able to bypass the rites of passage that African American men live through: Driving while black, the inherent racism that is passed down generationally, the disenfranchisement of a people. He didn’t grow up with that heaviness on his shoulders. He was able to skip the things that make a person of COLOR who they are and just be. He looked at the world through the eyes and experience of a white man in an African American’s body. By undergoing racial reassignment, Martin never grew up with the weight of a history wrought with unfairness, or his “initiation” the first time someone sneers the N word with pure hate. Bobbing along to hip hop, knowing the words of Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, and feeling more attuned to one culture does not an African American make.

During a conversation with another classmate, Kelly feels guilt for wanting to leave Baltimore the first chance he could. Looking at the blight in my own neighborhood, I don’t blame him. Why would anyone want to stay in a neighborhood that’s depressing, filled with a heaviness of no hope, and stained by poverty? Why would anyone want to stay in a place that makes them unhappy and miserable, playing the martyr to die on other people’s hills?

Not knowing what to expect when I began the book, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the story. Discussing the story with others, many joked they would consider it if this was indeed a reality. As a person who has had her race questioned due to music choices, voter’s registration, and how well I speak (aka my work voice), I can understand HOW a person could think he was born the wrong race. But does skin color really define a person?

Jess Row explores this question and others in this captivating story of youth, identity, and a person’s place in life.

[Terri · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is probably one of those books that needs to be read at least three times to really get it, but I just don't have the time to waste. While I do appreciate that it is trying to talk about race and identity, if I feel like I need to have a literary critic sitting next to me to explain it, then it wasn't executed well. I also understand that rules are bent for artistic purposes, but if you write 300 pages of dialogue without quotation marks, I just can't stand it.

[Chris Blocker · Rating 3 out of 5]

What if I was born of the wrong ethnicity? Could I be happier in a different culture? If I could change my ethnicity, would I? These are the kinds of questions at the center of Jess Row's novel Your Face in Mine. I could relate. Had racial reassignment surgery been a viable option twenty years ago, I would've begged my parents to allow me to do it (oh, I can imagine how well that would've gone). This is the point where I can get really personal and tell you my story, but I think I'll pass this time. Needless to say, I have long had my own doubts regarding cultural attachments and my place in the world.

Perhaps my personal experience is why I loved this book from the get-go. I could identify with Martin. As a character in a novel, I don't think Martin is developed well enough—I never quite got a sense of why he'd go through with the racial reassignment—nevertheless, I understood the unspoken and the understated: Martin's draw to blackness was an emotional need, the appeal of compassion and family he found lacking in his own culture. So Martin gets the surgery and creates a completely new identity and in the first pages of this novel, he calls out to Kelly, a friend from high school. It has been nearly twenty years. This is where the story blooms. Kelly has to negotiate his feelings about Martin being a completely different man. The narrative, as told by Kelly, gets lost in backstory, subplots, and philosophy, but these largely do not detract from the primary story. Sure, I didn't quite buy the relationship between the three high school friends (Martin and Kelly, plus Alan, a significant player in their past), nor did I find Martin's mental transition organic, but those things largely didn't matter. I was fascinated by Martin and the choice he'd made; I was intrigued by how different of a person he'd become simply by “changing his 'race'”. To add to my enjoyment of the story, Kelly's history was heartbreaking and a wonderful component to keep the primary story from growing stale. I loved this novel...

until I just stopped caring. Two-thirds of the way through Your Face in Mine, there's a drastic change. In comparison to the narrative flow and tone of the novel, Martin's racial reassignment seems mild. Suddenly we're in the middle of a suspenseful something-or-other. Characters do one-eighties on us, with the turn of a page they're someone else (which may seem apt given the book's subject, but in the context of the novel it felt like a ploy, manipulating the story into the mold of the author's desire). Character choices come out of nowhere and I never got a firm handle on the 'why'. More suspense and a random illogical appearance by a minor character from earlier in the novel left me wishing I'd put it down after Part One. Everything after and ever after did not gel for me.

It felt to me like Row was writing for me in Part One. No, the novel wasn't perfect and it was definitely not going to be an all-time favorite, but I could've handed it a five-star rating. Whomever Row was writing to in Part Two, it wasn't me. And I have a feeling that that person who loved Part Two probably didn't feel like Part One was written for them; that person will likely find all the philosophical discussions earlier in the book quite tedious. Your Face in Mine is an odd little book that has so much potential, but I'm not sure who the intended audience really is. It is a great idea for a story, but in the end this novel itself is suffering from questions of identity.

Received from the publisher through Goodreads' First Reads program in exchange for review.

[Rachael · Rating 2 out of 5]

The blurb for this caught me because of a trend that's been growing over at tumblr. There are the furkin, who believe that they are animals (typically wolves) trapped in the body of humans, the otherkin that play the same game but with supernatural creatures such as vampires and werewolves, and even fictionkin that develop perhaps too strong an attachment to their favourite fictional characters.

Among this club there is another group; the transracial or transethnic -- those that believe they've been born into the wrong race. Typically this is a sentiment expressed among extreme Japanophiles, but it's a concept I've not seen explored in literature too frequently, and so I was pretty excited when I received an advance copy of Your Face in Mine to review.

Kelly Thorndike has moved back to Baltimore following the tragic death of his wife and daughter, and just by chance one day bumps into Martin, an old friend from his childhood. Except this is not the Martin Lipkin that he remembers as a pale slim Jewish boy, this is now Martin Wilkinson - African American.

Martin recruits Kelly to follow his story, to help him launch it to the wider world and to bring Racial Transitioning to a global conciousness, to be the one to break the story. Having recently lost his public radio station due to lack of followership, Kelly rides along with this and ultimately goes through with the procedure himself, going from American to Chinese.

It's an interesting premise, but I feel the execution is what lets this novel down. For a novel that is entirely about race, it only touched on the subject of what it means to be black in America, or to become a part of the minority from a position of privilege and power. It's interesting to read accounts from women following their MtF transition and learn how this change impacts upon their daily life, but Martin only mentions, very offhandedly, perhaps two or three incidents about this challenge within the entire book.

There's a lot of what feels like filler -- in the early stages of the story a great deal is given to the radio station Kelly works for, seeming to no constructive end until perhaps within the final thirty pages or so during which he is confronted by Mort, an ex-employee, about his links to Martin, and the company which is a shell of sorts for this racial surgery. The encounter seems to deflate very quickly though, with Kelly simply walking out of the conversation and simply negating any conflict there may have been.

One of the main transformations within the novel comes within the final fifty or so pages when Kelly learns that he was invited to cover Martin's own transformation, to travel with him to Thailand, was simply a ruse to persuade him to go through the procedure himself and become Chinese. Kelly accepts this within a couple of pages or so. Kelly has spent time studying and working in China and this was where he met his wife, Wendy. The only indication though the entire 300 or so pages up to this point is a brief moment in which, following the loss of their daughter and granddaughter, Wendy's parents ask Kelly to stay with them. He declines because, being white, he is always going to be a foreigner and outsider within their community. It's a short exchange, and nothing that would lend credence to Kelly's easy and swift acceptance - the agrees to the procedure and it is started the following day!

It felt like such a terrible decision, and one that was made by someone still in the throes of grief, given that Kelly still speaks and converses with his dead wife in the early stages of the novel, and and irreversible one that he would come to regret within a couple of years.

Despite this being a novel that crosses race and boarders the characters had no distinct voice. This was particularly challenging given Row's decision to not use quotation marks, and there were a number of chapters featuring multiple speakers, sometimes in the region of 4-5, with very little to indicate who was saying what. This combined with long passages about the history of Baltimore, business, politics, all packed to the brim with jargon and unnecessary details, made for a very difficult read.

I half wonder if part of this was intentional, if Row meant to leave us unsure of who was saying what, to peel away these boundaries in the same way he was doing so with race -- these people have the same voices because in essence they are all the same. Only, it doesn't make for particularly enjoyable or engaging reading.

There were some spots in there that did shine though, notable the passages relating to Martin and Kelly's childhood and their history with Alan, and these sections were definitely much more engaging and leant more to character development. I only with they weren't so far and few between.

I was provided this copy as an ARC for which I am very grateful, but if you'd like to check it out for yourself Your Face in Mine is out August 14th from Riverhead Books.

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 3 out of 5]

The premise was great. The writing was bland, though, and left me feeling that many potential punches were checked. "Polished" comes to mind as the way to describe this writing...not in a good way. The sentences sound good but tend to use seven words where one would do. There is a lot of saying exactly the same thing over again in the next sentence--both sentences artful enough but, damnit, pick one and edit out the other one. Also there was lot of unnecessary throat clearing in the narrative voice itself--"perhaps," "of course," etc. really dragged on the storytelling. This all may feel really nit-picky but for me it weighed the story down to the point of tedium.

Also, I never really felt the author owned his own premise. He, and through him the narrative voice, never felt comfortable to me in the role of explaining what it would be like to meet an old friend who had chosen to live life as a black man instead of his "Designated at Birth" race/ethnicity of white Jew. I found myself wishing this book had been written by Percival Everett, who has completely pwned this edgy territory of race identity in his novels. Anyone who was like me intrigued by the premise of this book, but disappointed in the delivery, should immediately look up Everett's 2001 novel, Erasure.

[Christine · Rating 1 out of 5]

Did not finish this book. Utter nonsense. I tried to get through it because the writing is good, but the storyline is fuzzy. Another White man trying to sound profound about race. I'm tired.

[Zach · Rating 2 out of 5]

in my adult life, i’ve never been so naîve as to believe we live in a post-racial society, but the last two months or so, with the events that’ve unfolded about a half-hour’s drive away from the somewhat homogeneous town i live in, confirm we’re even farther away than i thought. for the first two weeks, i kept very close tabs on the situation in ferguson, fascinated in one sense by the righteous anger the community articulated in response to such a blithely racist, unselfcritical institution. and then i felt repulsed at myself, because in spite of all that i just fucking sat there, i sat there and watched feeds into the late night and then i feel asleep and woke up and went to work, where my co-workers said the same blithely racist things about the protestors and belittled their causes from afar. and i said almost nothing at all in response, offered no riposte except a weak rhetorical question here and there, and adopted a thousand-yard stare when someone broached the subject with another one of their self-satisfied Hot Takes. i let guilt and hand-wringing and self-loathing again consume fierce underpinnings of solidarity. by virtue of my relative invisibility and mobility and privilege, i could and did hide my real feelings and still lived without the nagging fear that i might be harassed or debased or extrajudicially murdered at the hands of another person, another person who wields a nominal power, who believes Hard Work gives him baseline license to use it forcefully when he harbors the delusion that those who are less powerful might take it away from him.

it was around this time, when i started taking stock of my concerned whiteboi inaction, that i started your face in mine. i found myself glancing at the photo on the back cover: a studious-looking, kind of burly white dude. intense stare. groomed beard. careful shadow to hide a regressing hairline. could be me in fifteen years. the conceit of jess row’s book hinges on “racial dysphoria,” which sounds like it simultaneously could and couldn’t be a thing. at the book’s outset, our widowed protagonist, kelly, moves back to baltimore from china and runs into his old school friend, martin, in a parking lot. only instead of the jewish kid kelly always knew, the man staring back at him is black.

still here? okay.

martin agrees to explain to kelly the basis for, and the process of, his racial reassignment. in exchange, he wants his old friend, who knows about his life birth assignment and the paradigm-shifting trauma both of them faced, to use his meager journalistic background to frame the narrative into something the public will find more digestible. martin’s taped confessions feel genuine, like a document of a true dysphoria.

it’s weird, however, that row reaches toward gender dysphoria as a one-to-one reference point for his characters’ feelings. it’s weird that he doesn’t examine that in greater depth, that he doesn’t try to pick it apart and study it as he does with other aspects of the idea. still weirder is how his characters, who all seem to have the germ of his own education and “progressiveness,” flippantly use the term “transsexual” (even martin). that notwithstanding, gender and race, it seems to me, are similar constructs, but they aren’t the same. martin (and, perhaps by extension, row) some baseline assumptions made about the possibilities of gender dysphoria to sell his existence to the rest of the world. eventually this leads to an interesting, if muted, running commentary on capital and identity.

that's but an example of the ideas row seems to three-quarter-ass in service to a taut story. row metes out engaging story changes and different perspectives in his dialogue - in fact, the conversations his characters have are often the novel’s high points. kelly’s own traumas are also tenderly written but not overwrought. but by the last 70 pages or so, row tries high-concept and higher tension, and it starts to deflate like a leaky balloon.

it sounds like i’m dumping on this book, but i want to like it. it’s an ambitious idea. but it’s just quite not dense enough, or long enough, or authoritative enough to navigate intersectionality in the ways i want it to. as a white cis dude with progressive pretensions, i want a book like this to straight up flip the table on me instead of offering my own tepid platitudes.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read only 1/4 of this book, and while I like it; I don't want to finish it. I spent all of last night and this morning while on vacation re-reading (speed-reading really) a book I've read about 6 times instead (Soulless by Gail Carriger).

I'll probably pick this book up again in 27 years in paperback at yard sale and give it another go.

[Rachel Wexelbaum · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am taking a mental break from writing for a few days until the mood strikes me, so I read a book that caught my attention a few months ago.

"Your Face in Mine" addresses an intriguing concept--the possibility that some people may see themselves as members of a race of which they were not born, and that they could have the option to change their race through "racial reassignment surgery". Imagine if someone decided to take this concept in order to make a boatload of money and potentially take over the world. That is all I want to say about the book, because anything more would spoil it...read it and see what you think.

[Ash · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel that Jess Row's Your Face in Mine might be one of those books that I'll have to be a little older to appreciate it. That's not to say that I didn't like it or understand it because I did. I guess my problem was that I wasn't fully engaged in it. I felt like a spectator; a gawker. I read the concepts but they didn't affect me.

Superficially, Your Face in Mine is about a man named Kelly Thorndike who encounters an old high school friend of his named Martin. The trouble the Jewish Caucasian boy Kelly knew as Martin Lipkin is now the African American man named Martin Wilkinson. As Martin explains to Kelly, he had what he has penned as "Racial Identity Dysphoria Syndrome", went to a special cosmetics doctor in Thailand, and had "Racial Reassigment surgery."

Martin wants Kelly to write his story so that RIDS can become a real diagnosis and racial reassignment surgery can become a legal procedure in the states. Kelly is right to be hesitant because Martin isn't telling him everything. Soon, he learns that everyone keeps secrets including to ourselves.

First, I want to say that I enjoyed Row's writing. There was something very crisp and blunt to it. However, I did not enjoy his lack of quotation marks to distinguished different dialogue. I got confused more than once.

The concept was an incredibly interesting one. Changing your race and wanting to market it? It's a very ballsy move. Then you add Kelly's isolation and loneliness, his being very malleable to Martin's will, and philosophical mumrmings on what really makes a person, Your Face in Mine really does pack the one-two emotional punch.

I felt that I should have liked it more than I did. I should have felt when that little twist was revealed but I didn't feel much of anything. Sometimes, it felt like it was too philosophical; too smart for its own good. Also, a lot of the characters, with the exception of Kelly, unlikable.

However, imagining the prospect of becoming unrecognizable and becoming a entirely different person, is very tantalizing. I just wished Your Face in Mine was as well.

[chantel nouseforaname · Rating 4 out of 5]

I mean I thought it was interesting; it was a great premise -racial reassignment surgery. It did not feel sci-fi at all. Read more like a commentary on society and interpersonal and personal satisfaction. The main character, Kelly, was almost forgettable in a way. Miserable. However, I can empathize - he went through an extremely traumatic event and was kind of numb. He explains how he got that way. The most intriguing parts of the story were listening to/reading Martin's recordings. It was eye-opening. I thought that's what solidified the socio-existential elements I felt I was engaging with while following the story.

Then ending was dope; kinda predictable in a way - not the fact that Kelly became inextricably linked to the situation but the fact that who gets popped; gets popped. Like I seen that coming a mile away - that that dude was gonna it; it just seemed inevitable if you've ever watched television. It's funny because I seen the movie playing out in my mind as I was reading the novel and I seen Mahershala Ali as Martin as an adult and like a Peter Rosenberg-looking dude playing Kelly. I don't know. HAHA.

Anyway, I recommend the book for sure. It was entertaining without being pretentious or self-absorbed or very science-y.

[Tracey · Rating 1 out of 5]

Seeing as I didn't read this book all the way through, fully comprehend it, or had any interest in it, I'd like to say that my rating is completely invalid. I heavily skimmed this novel and I'm not even sure how it ended. I think Kelly got the operation done as well but I was not paying attention at this point. The writing style was annoying. It all rambled together. I had no idea who was talking when or what about. The characters were all boring and I couldn't wait to finish such a drag of a book. The only redeeming parts were the descriptions of Baltimore. It was fun knowing exactly where the characters were in the story. Other than that, this goes in the loser pile of book club reads for me.

[Angie Reisetter · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got an ARC of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. And I'm having a little difficulty in rating this book. First of all, the main subject of the book, as described in its blurb, is weird. Strangely, enticingly weird. But it's not the only thing going on in this story. There are lots of other layers, almost making me feel, in the end, that there was a little too much in here to be handled well. You would think that there's a lot in there about the difference between being white and black in America. And there's some of that, but not to the depth I expected at the outset. It's not so much a cultural/society book as it is about individual longings, longing to belong to a group that isn't naturally our own, that is out of reach because it requires a different appearance. If you could be of any ethnicity you wanted, what would you choose? How would that affect the meaning of that ethnicity? The main character in this book, Kelley, has a lot going on, a lot of baggage to deal with. He's kind of a mess. And he doesn't really work through it all in the course of the story. In fact, I would say that the whole book is a little messy. Big, ambitious, and messy. I suppose many of us have lives that are messy. But it makes for a mixed reading experience.

With regard to the plot, I started thinking that Kelley was sane and that Martin was crazy but harmless. And I ended up thinking Kelley was crazy and perhaps a danger to himself, and that Martin was crazy and sinister. So dealing with the insanity became the focus of my reading, rather than any larger cultural questions.

I did have a little bit of difficulty with the writing style of the author. Specifically, his tendency not to use quotation marks or paragraph breaks to clarify his dialogue made the book difficult to read with no clear advantage. It's art for art's sake, but actually gets in the way of the story.

I guess what I'd say is that this book is good, but not quite all the way there yet. Like my first attempt at a new dish that tastes okay, but not amazing, that needs a little work to make it all come together. But I eagerly anticipate the next try -- I would definitely read this author again. And the book is worth recommending for the sake of the discussion it can engender.

[b aaron talbot · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is a fascinating exploration of race, racial/ethnic identity, class, culture, body modification, trans* issues, grieving, and capitalism...i loved it.

martin, the protagonist, suffers from "racial identity dysphoria syndrome (rids)" (self-diagnosed, i might add), and has undergone racial reassignment surgery. and right from there, this book could easily fall into a cheesy, "soul man" narrative, filled with sand traps of crappy discussion between characters of different racial/ethnic backgrounds drudging through stereotypes, real and imagined. but it doesnt. through martin, kelly (the main character) explores not only his own life and what it means up to this point, but martin's as well. it does not give anything away to say kelly and martin knew each other in high school, when martin was an awkward white jewish kid who becomes a leading black entrepreneur in baltimore.

what i found most intriguing about this book is the way it equated the racial reassignment with trans* issues. martin constantly refers to his racial reassignment as the leading edge of a new form of identity, one of limitless physiological possibilities. he often references the first sex change operations as a pre-cursor to his endeavor. and within the framework of the novel, i can see the similarities.

at several, several, times during this book, i thought i was finally finding a cringe-worthy plot point that would make me say "ugh" and give me reason to not take it seriously. but for me, that didnt happen. quoting everyone from foucault to fugazi, jess row did a masterful job of creating realistic characters and a possible future (futuristic) phenomenon.

i highly recommend this book.

[Holly · Rating 3 out of 5]

To be accurate the three stars is for the first 229 pages of this novel and I didn't actually read to the end. But for much of the first half I was gripped, and I'm satisfied with that. The story and characters (of Part One) were intriguing to me. Kelly's voice was thoughtful and just weird enough to keep me unbalanced. I liked how his experience as an outsider/insider in another culture (China) informed and complicated his understanding of racial and cultural identity. It was also interesting to watch him re-encounter the world after the loss of his family - his observations about grief rang true. And the public radio station scenes (and the office meltdown) were great. On another level I relished observing how Jess Row, a white male author, was attempting to pull off a risky story about identity politics and racial assignment surgery. This was electric.

But in Part Two something shifted. I was taking too long to read it because of work commitments, but something in the tone and the pace changed and the careful thoughtfulness was being squandered. I don't even know or care if Martin's wife ever found out about her husband's identity, whether the frequent references to Kelly and Martin's deceased friend Alan ever led to anything, what the truth behind Martin's reasons were. They don't matter to me. (I just viewed the spoiler in a two star Goodreads review. That is just crazy. I'm glad I didn't devote my time to following Kelly to that conclusion.)

[Seymone · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Since I can't have you, I want to say, I have to become you."

Race dysmorphia. Is there such a thing? Can one feel like the race they have been born into, is incorrect? What if you could change your race via surgery, would you? These are the questions that the author grapples with.

This is a deep and thought provoking novel. It was interesting to get inside the minds of those who feel like they are an imposter among people that visually/racially look like them. I was impressed that the author dealt with white privilege, so honestly.

"Look at any monocultural society. Privilege flees from itself. Whiteness flees from itself. Can't you see that's what I am doing?"

"Why would I choose that? Why would I step out of the circle of belonging, where I've always been? The gilded prison house of Whiteness, with its electric fences, its transparent walls? Being the most visible, therefore the most hated, of all? The one that can always condescend, not the one condescended to? Reader, doesn't the question answer itself?


I would recommend this book, highly!

[Aumaine Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little too speculative for me but at times poignant. Prefer his nonfiction more

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

The premise of Your Face in Mine is certainly an intriguing one: white-dude Kelly Thorndike runs into a black guy he doesn’t recognize on the streets of Baltimore. It turns out it’s his old school friend, Martin. The thing is, Martin used to be a white guy, too. After several years, some very high-tech plastic surgery in Bangkok, a little vocal training, and a full immersion in black culture, he is now a very convincing black businessman.

Kelly finds all this very strange, but adjusts to the idea pretty readily. When Martin asks him to write an article about him and his experience, he agrees—despite the fact that Kelly isn’t actually a journalist. A bulk of the narrative appears in the form of interview transcripts and long conversations between characters. Doctor reports, business plans, and psychiatric evaluations are also included in full. At times I felt like I was reading the author’s dissertation notes rather than a story.

It might be fair to say that the author enjoys hashing out ideas more than digging deep into human psychology. To his credit, though, the ideas are pretty thought-provoking. The novel invites the reader to consider whether “racial dysphoria” (the term Martin uses to self-diagnose his particular condition) might be a real, accepted phenomenon. People can be born feeling like they are the wrong gender. What about race? Culture? How far can this dysphoria go—and how far might we go to change the circumstances of our birth? More to the point, how much would we be willing to pay for it? Can we package and sell race and identity along with everything else?

While the book asks many unsettling questions about race and identity, one big piece of the conversation is missing; cultural (or racial) appropriation is never really mentioned. Martin insists that, before his transformation, he was a black man in a white man’s body. He wants us to buy into the idea that he is black in some essential way that transcends skin color. Is racial dysphoria a legitimate psychological condition . . . or just, as a reviewer on Slate puts it, “a kind of holistic minstrel routine”? I wanted someone to take Martin to task for this!

The story really picks up once Kelly travels to Bangkok, ostensibly to interview the plastic surgeon for his “article.” The plot kind of goes off the rails at this point. (Spoiler alert!) When in Bangkok, another character suggests that Kelly should go under the knife to become Chinese. He is shocked, but maybe a day later he’s seriously considering it. What? This is ludicrous! Kelly comes up with his reasons for wanting it, but they are completely unconvincing.

In a nutshell, Your Face in Mine is a flawed book, but the author seems very intelligent and has a very wacky imagination, which I appreciate.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Notable Novel on Race Relations Which Brilliantly Uses Speculative Fiction as Satire

"Your Face in Mine" is the only recent speculative fiction novel by a mainstream literary fiction writer which I have found artistically and intellectually rewarding, and one which is leagues ahead of anything written as speculative fiction by the likes of Margaret Atwood and Colson Whitehead, to name but a few, with the author writing as though this was an artistic collaboration between Studs Turkel and Philip K. Dick, as Victor LaValle has noted in his effusive praise for this novel. Much to his credit, Row has succeeded admirably in using speculative fiction's great potential for satire, in writing about American race relations and the search for identity in an era of substantial globalization, in what might be viewed mistakenly, as a white American writer's effort at cheapening - or coarsening - race relations by trying to see the world through the eyes of his African-American protagonists. While the notion of "racial reassignment surgery" may sound nonsensically far-fetched, Row has made a reasonable fictional extrapolation from current transgender surgical practices, without making it seem unrealistic. There is much to commend in Row's novel, not simply because of his fine prose and storytelling, but, perhaps more importantly, in his sympathetic portrayal of his main protagonist, Kelly Thorndike, who remains haunted by the tragic, unexpected, death of his Chinese-born wife and his young daughter. Thorndike's long-lost high school friend, Martin Lipkin, is nearly as compelling as Thorndike in his own right, especially in his tape-recorded soliloquies recounting the reasons behind his decision to subject himself to "racial reassignment surgery". Given the timeliness of the issues explored in "Your Face in Mine", as well as the brilliant usage of speculative fiction, superb prose, and memorable storytelling, Jess Row's novel should be viewed as among the finest published this year, and one that may be remembered as a classic fictional exploration of American race relations at the dawn of the 21st Century.

[Rebekah Crain · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I first read the book blurb for Your Face in Mine my interest was immediately piqued. What an unusual subject matter, and how exactly would the author write this curious story? So it was with quite a bit of excitement that I started in on my ARC copy. Sadly, my excitement was short lived. I can't say what exactly I hoped for because honestly I'm not even sure I know myself what it was. What I can say though is that I really had to push myself to stick with this book long enough to complete reading it. It took me several days to even get to page 100 as I just found myself bored. It was wordy, but not in a good way. (Yes, I know it's a book and books are supposed to be wordy. This just wasn't the good kind of wordy. lol) After about the first 100+ pages the story did pick up a little bit; however, it still didn't keep my attention as much as I had hoped. The story was definitely unlike anything I've read before, but I don't think it really reached out to me. It didn't always make a ton of sense, and when it did it just was kind of blah.

I would say I'd give this one 3 of 5 stars as it wasn't the worst book I've ever read, and the author definitely deserves points for the creativity of her subject matter. Likewise I'm sure there are plenty of readers out there that will completely "get" this story and find it to be the best thing written since who knows what. For me, this just wasn't it.

Glad to have the preview opportunity though. The book is due out next month August 2014 for anyone interested in checking it out for themselves.

[Gayle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received a digital book from First to Read.

This certainly was not what I expected, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Our Caucasian protagonist, Kelly, is floundering since the death of his Asian wife and their daughter.
He runs into an African-American man who addresses him by name. The eyes look familiar, but he cannot place the man. He learns this is an old friend from high school who is back from Bangkok following reassignment surgery. Racial reassignment.

He wants to hire Kelly to follow him around as he begins to reveal his true identity to those who know him only as a black man, and not the white Jewish man he used to be. This includes his wife, an African-American medical doctor.

I don't want to let any spoilers slip out.
The book held my interest and took an unexpected twist.

One thing I do not like is the author failed to use quotation marks. There are none in the entire book, and it took me a while to get acclimated.

I don't know if the writing was average or if the fact I was reading on a screen hampered a higher depth of enjoyment.

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

A man suffering from RIDS (Racial Identity Disorder Syndrome) changes his appearance with surgery and drugs to be accepted as the racial identity he believes himself to really be. He enlists the help of an old friend (who is trying to live with the loss of his family) so they can spread awareness about RIDS and tell his story.
I loved the writing in this novel. Reminds me of Jonathan Lethem when he's at his best. It's not the precise detail it is the encompassing of self you feel when merging into a well written story. The same feeling you have when Stephen King barely describes the physical features of a character and yet you walk away feeling like you know every laugh line and unruly eyelash. Not a page-turner in the conventional sense but a book that nevertheless calls out and keeps you up much later than you intended.

[John Pappas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jess Row's ambitious novel deals with cultural appropriation, identity politics and the meanings of race in a post-structural world on the cusp of making "racial reassignment surgery" a reality. The narrator, a man ostensibly tapped to be the biographer of the first man to suffer from "racial dysmorphia" and undergo a white-to-black transformation, and who is himself dealing with his own personal demons, is both intrigued and confounded by what the result of the wide-spread practice of this procedure would be. The book doesn't function as a satire but asks some important questions about identity, about who and what we are in a century where crude seems global, suspended, costumal, rather than local, deeply rooted and real. Even though it doesn't posit definitive answers leaves the reader more enlightened for the consideration of those issues. 3.5 stars.

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strong start, really strong finish, boring and pretentious middle. I would likely have stopped reading this book if I wasn't on vacation with lots of free time. Jess Row, you're smart, I get it. But this would have been a lot better if every character wasn't just spouting off race theory more or less constantly. I got a little angry when I finished this book because I thought there were some moments that were so good and thought-provoking, and some elements of the story that were really interesting, but overall the book was way less than the sum of these parts.
I also resented having to have a bunch of pretentious conversations about the potential fluidity of racial identity when people asked me what I was reading.

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I bought this book years ago because of the wild premise. I had even unhauled it already, but I still kind of wanted to see what I would think about it. Well . . . I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the way the characters spoke about race and I COULD NOT STAND how Kelly viewed women. Also, I didn’t like how the idea of Black trauma was framed; we just hear about how it’s so “depressing” to all the white people in Baltimore. Lastly, the narrative structure and the amount of each part of the story we get did not really work for me.

On a lighter note, some of the stuff Martin said about feeling like a Black person was laughable, in a “I can’t believe you can say such stupid things with your whole chest” type way.

[Vonetta · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was nowhere near as bad as its Goodreads rating implied! I actually really enjoyed it. Yes, it was cerebral and involved thinking abstractly about race -- both of these concepts tend to frighten people. Taken for what it is, the book had an entertaining plot and pulling prose. It took a minute to get used to the dialogue not being in quotation marks, but I actually didn't mind it; in fact, I imagine it was a challenge for Row to create dialogue differentiated enough for the reader to hear the characters' voices without signals. Overall, I liked! But I only recommend for people who like thinking about controversial topics abstractly.

[Jane · Rating 1 out of 5]

Novel. Based on the premise of racial reassignment surgery, two people meet randomly in Baltimore and then realize that they were high school classmates. The difference is that in high school, both were white. But, one of them who grew up white & Jewish, decided to become black through racial reassignment surgery. This is an interesting premise for a book. However, I found it unreadable because of the author’s decision to forego the use of all quotation marks so it was incredibly difficult to know who was speaking. In addition, the writing was particularly dense.

[Natalie Draper · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wasn't going to read this book. Then the whole Rachel Dolezal thing happened and suddenly the book seemed eerily prescient. Racial reassignment is an interesting premise for speculative fiction but this book lacks the satirical edge, or any edge really, needed to keep the narrative from being as dull and shallow as it ended up.

[Read In Colour]

The premise sounded so interesting, but the writing was too technical and not good enough to keep me engaged.

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

Conceptually fascinating - 20 years after high school a man reconnects with an old friend who has surgically changed his race. However, it bogs down and becomes tiresome.