That Kind of Mother

"Rumaan Alam’s first book, Rich and Pretty, wrote the intimacies of female friendship so well that I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that his second novel takes on two mothers with breathtaking insight. Rebecca, white, well-off, well-intentioned, offers to care for her nanny Priscilla’s son when Priscilla, who is black, dies in childbirth. Cheryl, Priscilla’s older daughter, who is pregnant herself, accepts Rebecca’s offer gratefully, and the arrangement becomes permanent when Rebecca adopts the baby. The book is an incredibly honest look at transracial adoption – the sometimes thoughtless way in which the white and liberal Rebecca parents her black son, contrasted with Cheryl’s clear-eyed understanding of how that thoughtlessness can become erasure. Neither woman is a caricature, however – Alam offers kindness as well as honesty about a complex situation in which love and good intentions are not necessarily enough."

"The wonderful That Kind of Mother by Rumaan Alam showed that a male writer can fully inhabit the perspective of a mother as well."