Lois 's Reviews > We Rip the World Apart

I found this a bit melodramatic but good with multiple respectability politics style viewpoints. This is told in alternating timelines and with alternating point of view chapter characters.

Evelyn's story opens in the mid 80's in Toronto but bounces back into her childhood in Nova Scotia and time as a newly married woman in Jamaica. Her chapters move forward until the late '00s. She's white, married to a Black man, Kinglsey, and has 2 kids: Antony & Kareela.

Kareela's story is set in 2022. During the summer the Black Lives Matter protests for George Floyd became global. Her brother and father are dead. She is estranged from her mother and desperately misses her paternal grandmother, Violet, who helped raise her. 

I loved the audiobook as it is beautifully narrated by Tebby Fisher. Her Jamaican accents are delightful. As is her ability to hold emotion in her voice. She was the perfect choice for this story.

This story dealt with race in a very shallow way. It felt like Evelyn's story was being weighted down with trauma, so her story and feelings could be centered in a story about Black trauma. Evelyn's voice felt much more central to the story than her daughter's voice. We see Evelyn's flawed view of racism but her Black husband, son, and mother-in-law don't get full agency or even fully fleshed out storylines. They exist so that the character of the white woman can grow. I'm not interested in how white folks feel about the trauma of police violence in Black communities unless we're gonna truly deal with race, and this simply doesn't. Evelyn's experiences are harrowing but feel like they may have happened in the 50's or 60's. Her shunning by the Black Community doesn't fit with my experiences, and I'm older than Antony. So, I just find this experience odd in Toronto. I'm currently living in Canada, and this seems a bit much for my biracial Black friends from Toronto and of similar age. Evelyn's story felt unrealistically harrowing. As if to balance the Black characters' struggles with racism.

Kareela just felt two-dimensional. Partially because her story is a tragic mulatto story in many ways. All of which would've been acceptable for me if this had dealt with race in a real way. Instead the reader is consistently shown racial violence through the eyes of a white woman. Which could've been profound but wasn't.

I was deeply engrossed in this narrative, but this story ultimately felt somewhat superficial. I think because it deals with weighty Black community matters but mostly based on the emotional impact of the narrative on a white mom. If Evelyn had looked at her internalized racism and its impact on her husband, son, and daughter, this could've been deeply relevant. Instead, this is mostly about Evelyn's trauma and pain, when she was the character I was the least interested in in this story. This needed Violet, Antony, or Kingsley to also be point of view characters. 

Thank you to Charlene Carr, RBmedia/Recorded Books, and NetGalley for the opportunity to listen to and review this audiobook. All opinions and viewpoints expressed in this review are my own.