Book Review: "We Are Not Like Them" by Christine Pride

*Spoiler warning!*

4/5 stars

"What do you see when you see me?

Have you made up your mind about who I can be?

You could get to know me if you tried

You could see what I'm like inside

I am made of blood, bones, and muscles too.

So how can you say I am less than you?

I have so many dreams, even at my age.

Let me be free, don't put me in a cage.

Watch what I can do."

We Are Not Like Them is a story of an interracial friendship tested by the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager involving two police officers. One of those police officers happens to be the husband of one of the friends.

Jenny and Riley grew up as sisters in everything but blood, Jenny the only white child at the home daycare Riley's family ran. Riley's grandmother, Gigi, considered Jenny her "firecracker" and embraced her as if she were her own child. The two girls did almost everything together, were practically inseparable. As a reader, you can viscerally feel how much they valued and trusted each other, accepted the other's flaws and blindspots.

Then comes the inevitable distance of adulthood. 

But Riley has moved back home in pursuit of her dream to be a news anchor and is about to see Jenny for the first time in a while. They meet up at a bar, eager to pick up where they left off. Jenny is six months into her pregnancy, after many miscarriages, and is giddy to tell Riley she's going to be a mother. The way they told each other about anything and everything, almost like old times.

However, their reunion is cut unexpectedly short when Jenny learns her police officer husband, Kevin, was involved in a shooting of a black teenager, Justin Dwyer, who was now in critical condition at the hospital. Justin later succumbs to his gunshot wounds. 

Both Jenny's and Riley's lives are shaken up by the implications of the shooting, accidental or otherwise. Jenny faces down the possibility of raising her baby while her husband is in jail, while Riley has been assigned to cover the story of the shooting. 

What follows throughout the book is our protagonists reckoning with the fallout and two women trying to communicate to each other about difficult subjects, like systemic racism. 

As a black woman, Riley struggles to tell her closest friend about her lived experience, and the implications behind the events Kevin is involved in. Riley is frustrated that Jenny is being self-centered in only thinking about events from her perspective, and is just not getting it. Jenny feels that Riley has betrayed her, "switched sides," instead of supporting her.

"It kills me how some people want so badly to believe racism is buried beneath layers and layers of history, 'ancient history,' they say. But it's not. It's like an umpire brushing the thinnest layer of dirt off home plate: it's right here. Only too often the trauma, the toll of it, remains unknown generation after generation. Like how Gigi kept her own awful secret, presumably to protect us from the ugly truth, and I've kept my own secrets, haunted by a similar shame."

This book made me uncomfortable, challenged me in so many ways, as did The Vanishing Half, the story about two black sisters who could pass as white. One chose to live in the white world, and one did not. Both books made me very uncomfortable in similar ways. 

They say that reading lets you step into another's shoes for a while, if not literally, then metaphorically. I won't pretend to now be an expert on the lived experiences of those dealing with racism in their daily lives, but I felt the book gave a mere peek to its readers, like myself. I want to understand completely, but I recognize I never will. 

While some say the book didn't go far enough in airing the thorny issues surrounding systemic racism in the United States, in favor of focusing on the friendship drama produced by the shooting (something I may agree with a bit), it doesn't invalidate the fact that We Are Not Like Them is an important book for people to read as the prelude to difficult conversations that need to happen on an interpersonal and international level about historical and ongoing harms. We need to be better. 

Happy reading!

--BookOwl