From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Wilson's winning 20th-century picaresque wanders from the Deep South to the Midwest and on to San Francisco, following its protagonist through multiple and surprising identities. If the locales exude a faint whiff of familiarity, Lee Cotton, the book's shape-shifting main character, has a body (and a mind) that keeps things interesting. Beginning life as a "black soul in a white wrapper," Lee leaves Mississippi after a horrific beating at the hand of a local racist. He passes for white in St. Louis, getting work as a hospital orderly. But fate has more changes in store. A freak accident and doctoring by an "offbeat" surgeon have him embark on a new life as a woman... and then Lee's skin starts to darken. Wilson (
Mischief) offers readers both a sharp-eyed, amusing ramble through America from the 1950s to the '70s and a critique of exclusionary identity politics. As Lee tells a heckler late in the book, "All my life I been hounded for being born the wrong color, or the wrong sex, or dating the wrong person, or living in the wrong place. We ain't what we're born. We're what we do with ourselves." Though marred by a somewhat hokey ending, this book is nevertheless very funny, profoundly endearing and highly memorable.
(Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to an alternate
Hardcover
edition.
From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–Before he is 30, Lee Cotton experiences life as a black boy, a white man, a white woman, and a black woman. The son of a black woman and a white Icelandic sailor, he was born in 1950 in Eureka, MS. White skin and blond hair notwithstanding, he was raised to know his place in the world. When he has a relationship with the daughter of a local bigot at age 15, he is beaten up by the Ku Klux Klan and left for dead. The staff at the St. Louis hospital to which he is transferred knows him only as a brain-damaged John Doe, and he gets his first taste of life as a white person. His memory returns just in time to be drafted for the Vietnam War. A car accident and misplaced whiskey bottle result in a sex-change operation by a disbarred physician, and, after several years as a white woman, his genes catch up with him and his skin slowly darkens. Farfetched though the plot may be, Wilson writes with an easy grace and humor that make Lee a thoroughly delightful protagonist. The author paints such a compelling picture of the South in the mid-20th century that it is hard to believe that he is British. In introducing Lee, he does far more than spin an irresistible tragicomedy that combines history with flights of fancy–he challenges us to look at what truly defines us if it is not our race, gender, or socioeconomic status.
–Kim Dare, Fairfax County Public Library System, VA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to an alternate
Hardcover
edition.
