Book Review Club - January 2022

This month I will be reviewing We are Not Like Them by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza.

It's a story about best friends, Riley and Jenny.  Riley and Jenny have been best friends since they were five years old.  Now, thirty years later, we're seeing how things have evolved between them.

Jenny always wanted to be married and have kids.  She is married, to Kevin, and is expecting her first child.  Getting pregnant had been difficult and she had gone through IVF unsuccessfully many times.  With their life savings depleted and their credit cards maxed out, it is Riley who gives them the money to try again, and this time it took.

Riley, on the other hand, wanted to be a journalist and went away to college for her education, followed by working ten years in another state before finally coming home to be an on-air reporter at their local news station.

Jenny is white and Riley is black.  Riley is also one of only two black people at the news station - the other one being a behind the scenes person.  So when news breaks that an unarmed black teenager has been shot by a white policeman, Riley is given the story to cover.  It's a career building story and one that is close to her heart because she is black.  She knows it will be a hard story to tell and tell it impartially. 

It's made harder when she learns that the policeman that shot the teenager is Jenny's husband, Kevin.

Each woman is going through their own personal struggle as it relates to how this one event, and the resulting events, impacts their respective lives.  Will the teenager survive?  Will Jenny and Riley's relationship survive?  Can they see and understand each other's perspectives?  The question is, how will it all play out?

Sadly, black and brown people being shot - and killed - by white police officers is not an unfamiliar one or one where we have to stretch the imagination over much but this story is told in a way that evokes emotion.  I read the question and answer session at the end of the book and the authors' goal was to make you feel empathy for both Riley and Jenny and they did that successfully.  It's told in alternating points of view of Riley and Jenny, who dig deep into their differences as well as their, hopefully, unbreakable love for one another.  It's a good book and well told.

I was immediately drawn in by the first two lines of the prologue, which are compelling, chilling and heartbreaking all at once:

When the bullets hit him, first his arm, then his stomach, it doesn't feel like he'd always imagined it would.  Because of course, as a Black boy growing in this neighborhood, he'd imagined it.

If you had asked me six years ago the status of racism in America I would've told you that it wasn't quite dead but it was in hospice care because I honestly thought there were few racists left in America.  But four years of an administration that emboldened the worst impulses of select groups and the resulting headlines of unarmed black and brown people being shot and killed by white police officers has opened my eyes.  As a white woman, I will never fully understand the challenges my black and brown friends face on a daily basis but this story touches on it in such a way that I hope it helps educate me - and others - if even just a little bit.

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