Comic-book artist Warren Duffy returns from Wales to Philadelphia with a failed shop and a failed marriage behind him, to settle the estate of his Irish-American father, whose last possession is a roofless, half-renovated mansion in Germantown. Warren, the light-skinned son of a Black mother, has always identified as Black while often being read as white. At a comics convention he meets Tal, a teenager raised believing she is white, and recognizes her as the daughter he never knew he had. Searching for a school for her, they fall in with the Mélange Center, a utopian community devoted to a specifically mixed-race identity, whose certainties collide with Warren's own black-and-white convictions. Ghosts, literal and figurative, crowd the house and the story, which builds toward a riot on Loving Day, the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision striking down bans on interracial marriage.
Author: Mat Johnson · Original publisher: Spiegel & Grau (New York), 2015
