Your Face in Mine

Starred review from April 21, 2014
This furiously smart first novel from Row (who wrote the short story collection The Train to Lo Wu) opens up difficult conversations about race and identity. The narrator, Kelly Thorndike, is back in his hometown, Baltimore, after his wife and daughter die in an accident. Now in his mid-30s, Kelly reconnects with Martin, a friend from his high school days. Back then, Martin was a white Jewish kid known as Martin Lipkin, but he suffered from racial dysphoria and later underwent “racial reassignment surgery.” Now Martin is a black man named Martin Wilkinson, and he recruits Kelly to tell his story. Martin’s relationship to the truth is flexible, and there’s potentially a lot of money to be made. Not every plot twist is believable, but that seems appropriate—although set in the present day, the book is also a foray to the edge of possibility. Martin’s goal of spinning racial reassignment into a global enterprise is half business plan and half pipe dream, but for Martin and his partners, the future is now. Your Face in Mine (note the slipperiness of the title: who’s who here?) takes readers on a zesty, twisty, sometimes uncomfortable ride.