Baltipink reviewed Everybody's Son by Thrity Umrigar
Review of "Everybody's Son" on 'Goodreads'
1 star
I should have trusted my instinct and put this book down after the first chapter. But I kept reading in the hope that the writer would surprise me with something more interesting to say. But no. She did not. She is not a bad writer. It is something of a page turner. But it was not enough to transcend the characters or the politics.
I will admit to you that, being adopted, I am extra sensitive when it comes to people who write things about adoption that center adoptive parents. I'm also real sick of people writing about drug use and addiction who don't know anything about it. I cannot stand one dimensional portrayals of poor, black neighborhoods. I don't appreciate people who use Malcolm X as a punchline or who casually throw in the name of Marx to show how they are so educated that they have looked at …
I should have trusted my instinct and put this book down after the first chapter. But I kept reading in the hope that the writer would surprise me with something more interesting to say. But no. She did not. She is not a bad writer. It is something of a page turner. But it was not enough to transcend the characters or the politics.
I will admit to you that, being adopted, I am extra sensitive when it comes to people who write things about adoption that center adoptive parents. I'm also real sick of people writing about drug use and addiction who don't know anything about it. I cannot stand one dimensional portrayals of poor, black neighborhoods. I don't appreciate people who use Malcolm X as a punchline or who casually throw in the name of Marx to show how they are so educated that they have looked at leftist thought and summarily dismissed it. And oh man is this lady up the ass of the "meritocracy." But the thing that really, really made me want to find the writer's house and slap her is how the birth mother is a mere plot device and not a whole person. All of these things should only be written about by the people who lived them...at least until there is nobody left who has.
This book is what happens when a liberal thinks that changing the black character in a book from the villain that conservatives make them out to be to the victim that conservo-liberals like to save is something to pat themselves on the back for.
Sorry. Just no.