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A review by queenmeega
Looking Glass by Andrew Mayne
1.0
I loved the Naturalist. The storyline of Dr. Theo Cray was quirky with enough intrigue in the plot to allow for an enjoyable murder mystery read. I looked forward to the Looking Glass because the author chooses not to return to the mountains/country but instead gave us an inner city father who needed help looking for his missing son.
What I got when I started this book was astonishing. I hate giving one star reviews. But, I feel like there is no other way to catch everyone's attention about the serious problems with this novel.
Andrew Mayne chose for the action of this novel to take place in an African country, an inner city neighborhood filled with people of color and the south. By making this choice, the novel's characters would predominately be African Americans.
So imagine my surprise when from the very beginning Andrew Mayne cannot describe any of said characters. The reader is forced to see over and over again "the black man." The black woman." "The elderly, black woman."
Now, it is not that Andrew Mayne is incapable of using descriptions of people in his story telling. He describes Jillian, Dr. Theo Cray's love interest, as having "dark-blonde hair and small town- hottie looks". Or his description of Bruce Cavenaugh, as "He's a genial man in his early fifties. The kind of guy who volunteers at his church on Thanksgiving to feed the homeless and helps strangers change flat tires." These are clearly not just descriptions but descriptions which evoke positive personality attributions. But Andrew Mayne never applies this descriptive tendency to the majority of the characters in the novel.
A particularly telling example of this involves the woman who lives in the house that Dr. Theo Cray suspects the murderer occupied at one time. She has several pages of storyline and what happens with her continues to come up later in the book. We, the readers, are told that she is a short, elderly black woman. Contrast this with Andrew Mayne's description of the cop who is called to her house in the next chapter. He is described as "white, short blond hair, he looks like he should be in a Boy Scout uniform."
By this time I realized that this author was really going to describe the majority of the characters in his book as "Black" or "African American" and that in his mind, that was sufficient. Did a female character resemble Beyonce or Viola Davis? To this author, the only word needed to describe either Beyonce or Viola Davis is "black."
As I described this to several members of my book club, they all thought I was talking about a novel I was reading from the kindle store that was free and had never seen an editor. They were astounded when I pointed out that Andrew Mayne is a New York Times bestselling author and this book had passed through many hands- all of which somehow thought using "black" to describe almost every character in a book was acceptable.
Let me provide another illustration. Imagine you pick up a book that is a murder mystery set in a private boys school in Maine. The victim is male, the murderer is male, and most of those affected by the tragedy are male. And every male character is simply described as "the man" or "the boy", but woman characters are given more detailed descriptions that are coupled with positive personality traits. This is what it would read like: "The young officer, who had short blond hair and looked like she should be wearing a Girl Scout uniform handed me a picture of the victim, a boy bleeding from a head wound."
I was pretty disgusted after finishing this book. And yes, I completed it. I wanted to see if the author kept up his dehumanizing language for the entire novel and in this, he did not disappoint.
I know I need to finish this review and it is making me sad the longer I continue to write. My hope is that someone from his publishing house reads this. YOU HAVE TO DO BETTER. Without going into a long treatise about the effects of racism, I just want to say that people of color generally want to have the privilege to feel like their humanity is recognized. The fact that I can't pick up a murder mystery without tripping into someone who can't distinguish me from someone else with brown skin serves to show how pervasive racism is in our society.
What I got when I started this book was astonishing. I hate giving one star reviews. But, I feel like there is no other way to catch everyone's attention about the serious problems with this novel.
Andrew Mayne chose for the action of this novel to take place in an African country, an inner city neighborhood filled with people of color and the south. By making this choice, the novel's characters would predominately be African Americans.
So imagine my surprise when from the very beginning Andrew Mayne cannot describe any of said characters. The reader is forced to see over and over again "the black man." The black woman." "The elderly, black woman."
Now, it is not that Andrew Mayne is incapable of using descriptions of people in his story telling. He describes Jillian, Dr. Theo Cray's love interest, as having "dark-blonde hair and small town- hottie looks". Or his description of Bruce Cavenaugh, as "He's a genial man in his early fifties. The kind of guy who volunteers at his church on Thanksgiving to feed the homeless and helps strangers change flat tires." These are clearly not just descriptions but descriptions which evoke positive personality attributions. But Andrew Mayne never applies this descriptive tendency to the majority of the characters in the novel.
A particularly telling example of this involves the woman who lives in the house that Dr. Theo Cray suspects the murderer occupied at one time. She has several pages of storyline and what happens with her continues to come up later in the book. We, the readers, are told that she is a short, elderly black woman. Contrast this with Andrew Mayne's description of the cop who is called to her house in the next chapter. He is described as "white, short blond hair, he looks like he should be in a Boy Scout uniform."
By this time I realized that this author was really going to describe the majority of the characters in his book as "Black" or "African American" and that in his mind, that was sufficient. Did a female character resemble Beyonce or Viola Davis? To this author, the only word needed to describe either Beyonce or Viola Davis is "black."
As I described this to several members of my book club, they all thought I was talking about a novel I was reading from the kindle store that was free and had never seen an editor. They were astounded when I pointed out that Andrew Mayne is a New York Times bestselling author and this book had passed through many hands- all of which somehow thought using "black" to describe almost every character in a book was acceptable.
Let me provide another illustration. Imagine you pick up a book that is a murder mystery set in a private boys school in Maine. The victim is male, the murderer is male, and most of those affected by the tragedy are male. And every male character is simply described as "the man" or "the boy", but woman characters are given more detailed descriptions that are coupled with positive personality traits. This is what it would read like: "The young officer, who had short blond hair and looked like she should be wearing a Girl Scout uniform handed me a picture of the victim, a boy bleeding from a head wound."
I was pretty disgusted after finishing this book. And yes, I completed it. I wanted to see if the author kept up his dehumanizing language for the entire novel and in this, he did not disappoint.
I know I need to finish this review and it is making me sad the longer I continue to write. My hope is that someone from his publishing house reads this. YOU HAVE TO DO BETTER. Without going into a long treatise about the effects of racism, I just want to say that people of color generally want to have the privilege to feel like their humanity is recognized. The fact that I can't pick up a murder mystery without tripping into someone who can't distinguish me from someone else with brown skin serves to show how pervasive racism is in our society.