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jenkepesh 's review for:
We Are Not Like Them
by Christine Pride, Jo Piazza
Ugh.
I think this was well-intentioned. I think it was supposed to be an examination of the midlife crisis of a from-childhood friendship, how once one is truly into adult living, has made some mistakes and some choices that are very different from what the other friend chose, when life has handed each of you very different setbacks, how hard it is to fulfill the role of friendship in the way the other expects and needs you to, and how hard it is to face the idea of a reckoning to reset the friendship to the new realities.
I think there was also excitement about the idea of taking it into Cultural Relevance territory by creating additional tension between two lifelong best friends of different races who find themselves looking at a tragic community experience with entirely different viewpoints, each of which is high-stakes. What if the black friend and the white friend are each viewing the death of a local black teenager due to yet another too-quick shooting by white cops—what if one of the cops is the husband of the white woman? And genuinely not coming from a place of unconscious bias, but of following training to the letter? And there’s video evidence?
The premise isn’t the problem. It’s the execution.
(Well, maybe, the premise is a little the problem, because that coincidence of one’s husband being the cop who might end up in prison is just a little too dramatic.)
But the execution is a lot of the problem.
The co-authors are at least professional colleagues who participate in a podcast on race and society. Each has a lot of media experience. It feels as though they have exploited that “in.” The writing is breathless but also thoughtless, with howlers of error around the legal landscape when charging someone for murder (supposedly, these officers would be indicted by a grand jury for first degree murder, ridiculously far from the facts of the case, and when one is brought to court to enter a plea, the D.A. brings up two lesser murder charges instead, all for the same crime). Add to this, absolutely awful metaphors and similes, overdescription of action that then contradicts itself, scenes that feel pulled from reruns airing in the background while pounding out the requisite number of pages for weekly deadlines.
Just, ugh.
I think this was well-intentioned. I think it was supposed to be an examination of the midlife crisis of a from-childhood friendship, how once one is truly into adult living, has made some mistakes and some choices that are very different from what the other friend chose, when life has handed each of you very different setbacks, how hard it is to fulfill the role of friendship in the way the other expects and needs you to, and how hard it is to face the idea of a reckoning to reset the friendship to the new realities.
I think there was also excitement about the idea of taking it into Cultural Relevance territory by creating additional tension between two lifelong best friends of different races who find themselves looking at a tragic community experience with entirely different viewpoints, each of which is high-stakes. What if the black friend and the white friend are each viewing the death of a local black teenager due to yet another too-quick shooting by white cops—what if one of the cops is the husband of the white woman? And genuinely not coming from a place of unconscious bias, but of following training to the letter? And there’s video evidence?
The premise isn’t the problem. It’s the execution.
(Well, maybe, the premise is a little the problem, because that coincidence of one’s husband being the cop who might end up in prison is just a little too dramatic.)
But the execution is a lot of the problem.
The co-authors are at least professional colleagues who participate in a podcast on race and society. Each has a lot of media experience. It feels as though they have exploited that “in.” The writing is breathless but also thoughtless, with howlers of error around the legal landscape when charging someone for murder (supposedly, these officers would be indicted by a grand jury for first degree murder, ridiculously far from the facts of the case, and when one is brought to court to enter a plea, the D.A. brings up two lesser murder charges instead, all for the same crime). Add to this, absolutely awful metaphors and similes, overdescription of action that then contradicts itself, scenes that feel pulled from reruns airing in the background while pounding out the requisite number of pages for weekly deadlines.
Just, ugh.