Review: Good Talk by Mira Jacob

GOOD TALK

Mira Jacob


BLURB

“How brown is too brown?”
“Can Indians be racist?”
“What does real love between really different people look like?”

Like many six-year-olds, Mira Jacob’s half-Jewish, half-Indian son, Z, has questions about everything. At first they are innocuous enough, but as tensions from the 2016 election spread from the media into his own family, they become much, much more complicated. Trying to answer him honestly, Mira has to think back to where she’s gotten her own answers: her most formative conversations about race, color, sexuality, and, of course, love.

Written with humor and vulnerability, this deeply relatable graphic memoir is a love letter to the art of conversation—and to the hope that hovers in our most difficult questions.

★★★★★

Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations is an entertaining book about the author, Mira, coming to realize what it means to be a person of color even within her own family. Colorism played a role in her growing up and how she and others viewed her – she was too dark to be pretty which in turn made her less desirable for an arranged Indian marriage.

Mira has some tough and at times humorous conversations with her young son on what it means to be a person of color in America. The book opens up with her son asking about Michael Jackson. And moves onto him wondering if his white dad is afraid of him like other white people are afraid of dark-skinned people.

“Here is the thing, though, the real, true thing I still have trouble admitting: I can’t protect you from everything…I can’t protect you from spending a lifetime caught between the beautiful dream of a diverse nation and the complicated reality of one. I can’t even protect you from the simple fact that sometimes, the people who love us will choose a world that doesn’t.”

I listened to the audiobook and I’m glad I did because it was very entertaining. Each person had their own voice telling their part. It was like being in the kitchen cooking dinner while listening to a TV show in the other room.

Amy Signature

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Author: Foxy

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