A Good Neighborhood

I usually only read the first couple sentences of a blurb before deciding to read a book to avoid getting spoiled and I knew I had to read this one from the first line -- it's about a professor of forestry and ecology in North Carolina and I studied forestry and ecology in North Carolina! No way I could get away with not reading this. If I'd read more and had looked up the author I would have known that this was going to be a story about racial justice written by a white woman and, well, I would have still read it but at least I would have been forewarned.

This is such a good example of why we white people should just stay in our lanes. I feel the author is trying really hard to tell a sensitive story about how hard it is to be black in America but it isn't her story to tell. She bends over so backwards to make her black characters the antithesis of racial stereotypes that they become one-dimensional caricatures who can do no wrong. I'm sure this wasn't her intention but it ends up suggesting that people of colour need to be perfect angels in order to "deserve" justice which is just yikes.

Our Romeo and Juliet teen pairing consists of Xavier, a biracial boy who is talented and sensitive and "not like the other boys" (is that a thing? I think that's a thing now), and Juniper, a rich white girl who is virginal and Christian (but not weird about it) and, of course, insanely pretty. Neither have much of a personality beyond being Bright Young Things with missing fathers who are outcasts in some way. Xavier is constantly being described in ways that evoke the racist idea that he's "one of the good ones" and Juniper is such an idealised version of a woke white girl who is so much more enlightened than her bigoted parents and sees beyond Xavier's race to who he really is.

And this might be controversial but I don't think white authors should be using the n-word in books even if it is used to expose a character as racist. You could just not.

The ending also had me seeing red. There was this weird fake out that made me so angry as it was happening and then even angrier when it was revealed it hadn't actually happened. Everybody hates when that happens in movies, why would you write that into a book?? And the way it actually ended was just unnecessary and glorified suicide as a noble sacrifice akin to Martin Luther King Jr. Why go out of your way to paint Xavier as the opposite of the stereotype of a violent black man only to end his story in horrible violence not once but twice, first in the fake killing of the antagonist and then against himself? How exactly does that subvert the stereotype that black men are inherently violent??.

The author really tells on herself in the discussion at the end of the book too when she’s asked how she made sure to address issues of race with sensitivity and she says she read essays, talked to friends and drew on “the experience of being a minority during the three years [she] lived in the Philippines”. Excuse me, what? I’ve lived as a white minority in a white-colonised Asian country and have been to the Philippines and those experiences absolutely in no way compare to being a minority in America. We are a privileged minority in those countries. To compare your experience as a white American -- in particular -- in the Philippines to being black in America is just mind boggling to me. The audacity is staggering. Like the experiences are actually polar opposites. You were an American in a country that America colonised! People assumed I was American in the Philippines and treated me so nice because of that. I just can't.

Also in trying so hard to make sure Xavier doesn’t come across as a hypersexual black male she writes this bewildering sentence: "He knew he was supposed to want to jump if and when any girl asked. What normal cis male wouldn't?". Is she really trying to say that trans men can’t have sex drives or that gay and asexual cis men aren’t “normal”? She can't have really meant that, right?

And as shallow as the racial justice is in this book, the ecology is just as shallow. The author has lived in North Carolina for a long time but her knowledge of its ecology seems to have come from a cursory Google search. Everything is all oh plants are so great, they make our oxygen! Isn’t it cool how connected we are! North Carolina is so biodiverse! Just obvious statements about nature without any specific connection to particular ecosystems or ecological concepts. I was expecting something more interesting.

And when she does try to get specific she gets it wrong. The line about the “ubiquitous longleaf pine” drove me crazy! Bitch, longleaf pine are endangered! Yes the state toast does start “Here’s to the land of the longleaf pine” but they have not been “ubiquitous” since the white colonisers clearcut them and destroyed the fire regime maintained by the Native peoples that longleaf pine rely on to germinate. Hey, look at that, there’s an obvious metaphor for racial justice for you right there. I only ever saw longleaf pine on small plots where they were specifically propagated for conservation purposes and the one tree on campus that was planted in honour of a classmate who died in a motorcycle accident. Maybe she was thinking of the very common shortleaf pine that was able to outcompete longleafs after the fire cycle was disrupted? They do look similar except the leaves are, you know, shorter.

More importantly than that admitted nitpick, this book makes ecojustice look trivial. The main conflict is kicked off when the mother of our Romeo, the aforementioned professor of forestry and ecology, sues their white neighbours for damage done during construction of their house that is causing the several-hundred-year-old oak tree in her backyard to die. As a tree lover this did really pull on my heartstrings and I was all for her impassioned Erin Brockovich style fight to seek justice for the beloved tree. But given everything that it leads to it ends up just looking petty. Instead of demonstrating how intrinsically linked eco- and racial justice are it ends up making them look like they're in opposition. If she had just left well enough alone on the ecological front none of the racial injustice would have happened and that's just a bad message. It also ends up making her look "uppity" which is an even worse message.

My last point is less important but it was a strange coincidence that I happened to pick this book up immediately after finishing [b:The Mothers|28815371|The Mothers|Brit Bennett|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1460652458l/28815371.SY75.jpg|49031394] as both have the same unusual narration in that they switch between the omniscient third person and a first person plural perspective from a group of people peripheral to the story. This group works like a Greek chorus and provides an interesting perspective as we know the inside story of what's really happening with the main characters and they only know what they see from the outside. In both books this group is all like "oh if only we knew how this story would turn out back then" which provides nice foreshadowing. I really liked this technique in The Mothers and probably would have liked it in this book if I didn't have the direct comparison because it just wasn't done to as good effect. In The Mothers the narration comes from the "Mothers" of the church the main characters go to, a group of busybody old women who observe and comment on all the goings on among church members. This perspective makes a lot of sense and we see the Mothers interacting with the characters throughout the book and they talk about their own lives and give a lot of commentary about how things have changed since their day. They give context to the story and the community and they have personality. The first person plural group in this book is never really explicitly stated so I'm not sure if it's the neighbours in general or just the neighbourhood women? The neighbours don't show up at all in the story except for one book club meeting with just the women so I assume it's meant to be just them. They only interact once with Xavier and never with Juniper. They never talk about their own experiences or give any of their own personality. Because it wasn't clear for a long time who they were supposed to be I actually thought for a while that there might be a twist like it turns out the narration was coming from the trees in the neighbourhood. That actually would have been pretty cool. And yeah, this isn't a big criticism because I don't think I would have disliked it if it didn't suffer so much from comparison but it's something that just kind of adds to the overall shallowness of this book. Like it felt like the narration was just a cool device the author liked rather than having a deliberately thought out purpose like it did in The Mothers. And I'm not saying the author copied the idea from The Mothers, but maybe I am.

So I guess if I had to summarise this book in one word it would be: shallow. I didn't even touch on the feminism in this book which is also, yes, shallow and the attempt to discuss conservative Christian purity culture which is, again, shallow. So many causes were addressed that none of them were done justice. Ultimately, my takeaway from reading this is that white women really just need to stop trying to tell other people's stories for them, only partly because we just aren't good at it.

Edit: After writing this review I looked at other reviews and wow they are overwhelmingly positive. So many of the reviews are praising the author for addressing the Real Problems In Society Today. I’m having a hard time believing that so many people actually think this book says anything substantial about these Problems. Even scarier is that a lot of the one star reviews are by people mad that the book is trying to force An Agenda on them, which... I'm not even going to to touch that. And the more I think about it the more I feel like the problem with this book is it erases systemic oppression and makes everything about the individual. It’s all about how This Particular White Man Is Bad and These Particular Black People Are Good and This Particular White Girl Is Good and if all white people could just be Like Her then Racism Would Be Solved. This is a comforting idea for white people as it means we just need to be nice to people of colour and then we aren’t Part Of The Problem anymore. Similarly, all environmental issues are reduced down to This One Tree which is why the ecojustice aspect looks so trivial. The two main conflicts are over the life of one tree and the life of one black boy so obviously the tree is not important in comparison. Whereas in real life issues of ecojustice focus on large-scale environmental damage that directly affects and threatens the lives of people in mostly minority communities. Mitigating these environmental problems also directly saves human lives because these problems aren’t just I Like Trees And Don’t Want One To Die but Pollution Kills/Harms People And Is Disproportionately Concentrated In Poor, Mostly Minority Communities and Poor, Minority Communities Have Fewer Greenspaces Which Are Linked To Better Mental And Physical Health and many others. The systems of oppression that uphold a racist justice system are interlinked with those that recklessly pollute the environment and overlook providing greenspaces in poor communities and keep minority communities poor. It’s not an either/or solution because it’s not about saving one tree or one person, it's about dismantling the systems that harm people and the environment at the same time. And it’s so disappointing because there are so many good metaphors for this interconnectedness in ecology and how can a book that’s supposed to be about ecology and racial justice not take advantage of them.