A compelling novel about twins, young black women who are "light enough" to "pass." In the 1950s, at age 16 and faced with having to quit school to clean houses, they flee their small Deep South town of Mallard (where all the blacks are "light") for New Orleans. There, Stella passes for white, takes a job as a secretary, and marries her white boss. Desiree marries a dark-skinned man and has a dark-skinned daughter named Jude. When the marriage turns abusive, Desiree returns to Mallard with Jude, who is scorned by the light-skinned blacks and who eventually escapes to UCLA by being a track star. If this sounds like a set of double and even triple standards (who's scorning whom), it is. What elevated this to 5 stars for me was that Jude's lover Reese is transsexual, in transition from woman to man. I loved the way this subplot worked delicately to both echo and complicate the theme that identity--whether based in race or gender or any category that is ostensibly "fixed" and (usually) binary--is fluid. These categories are not "natural" in the sense that they have no meaning except for what we've given them; they're cultural constructs put in position to assuage some of the more primitive parts of our psychology--including our fear of the other. Definitely worth the read.
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