The Color of Family: A Novel

by Jerry McGill

Overview

A tragedy upends a family’s delicate balance in an emotional novel about secrets, guilt, friendship, race, and reconciliation by Jerry McGill, author of Bed Stuy: A Love Story.

Who wants to believe their family could ever be broken?

Devon and James Payne are brothers and rivals since childhood. But they share an affinity for sports that brings glory to their Connecticut town and promise for the future. Then they’re in a car accident. Devon is paralyzed for life, while James goes on to live the dream.

For the Paynes, the tremulous repercussions of that evening never settled. Over the course of a decade, Devon decides to visit his seven siblings now scattered across the globe. Each has moved on, yet each struggles to cope with the traumatic event that irrevocably connects them. Devon confronts not only his own demons and family secrets but also the guilt and heartbreaking betrayals that followed in the wake of the tragedy. He also discovers the power of forgiveness—and that coming to terms with the past is the only way to live free in the present.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781542035651
Publisher:	Amazon Publishing
Publication date:	01/01/2023
Pages:	252
Sales rank:	716,894
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

Jerry McGill is a writer and artist. He is the author of Bed Stuy: A Love Story and the memoir Dear Marcus: A Letter to the Man Who Shot Me. After receiving a BA in English literature from Fordham University in the Bronx and a master’s degree in education from Pacific University in Oregon, Jerry went on to teach high school and travel the world mentoring disabled children. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Editorial Reviews

A uniquely structured novel with memorable characters and a generational scope.” —Kirkus Reviews

“The shifting perspectives give contours to the sprawling family and its painful secrets.” —Publishers Weekly

“McGill’s prose is theatrical, packing every paragraph with action. The Color of Family crosses vast expanses of time and space, with secrets and twists unraveling at breakneck speed; it’s deeply engrossing. The family’s voices are alive and expressive through diary entries, interviews, rich dialogue, and detailed accounts of their familial relationships and social circles. The Payne family is unforgettable, and the humanity McGill observes through them is a gift.” —Booklist (starred review)

“In sparkling slivers of stories set from the early 1960s to the early 2000s, fortune batters a wealthy Black family of Connecticut, whose six children initially seem set for stardom in sports and beyond. A car wreck, [a] drug bust, illicit passions, and long-kept secrets change all that.” —People Magazine

From the Publisher

10/17/2022

McGill (Bed Stuy) compresses a fraught epic about a wealthy Black family into a compact and underdeveloped mosaic. Harold Payne, a successful magazine editor, lives with his wife, Camille, in Connecticut with their six children as well as two children Harold had with a French mistress. One of his sons, 15-year-old Devon, drives drunk, kills a young woman, and emerges with a quadriplegic injury. While Devon is in a fancy rehabilitation center in California (where he sells cocaine), his girlfriend, Gina, carries on a secret relationship with Devon’s older brother James, who escaped the car wreck uninjured to become a college football sensation. Chapters check in on the family over the following decades: Camille begs Devon to be tested as a kidney donor for an ill James, Harold has a stroke, Michel (one of the two French children) finds himself on the cusp of both fatherhood and rap success, and Devon, having flunked out of UCLA film school, faces prison for drug running. The shifting perspectives give contours to the sprawling family and its painful secrets, but the structure sacrifices depth for breadth. This novel of personal tragedies, bad decisions, and secrets doesn’t quite live up to its dreams. Agent: Priya Doraswamy, Lotus Lane Literary. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

2022-11-29
Decades in the life of a singular family.

In the acknowledgements, McGill writes about how he was inspired by J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories—and how it led him to write “my own story about a large and quirky Black family.” The book opens with the story of that family’s origins in 1963, when Morehouse College student Harold Payne meets Camille Preston, who is singing in a vocal group. The two quickly fall in love; in an early chapter set decades later, the omniscient narration recounts a family portrait and offers brief details about each of the couple’s six children—as well as the two children of Harold and a Frenchwoman with whom he’d had an affair. For instance, McGill writes that Kassandra, one of Harold and Camille’s children, attended her prom “dressed as Angela Davis and proceeded to get thrown out by security for dancing too provocatively to a Prince song and making out on the dance floor with her date, the head cheerleader of a rival high school.” Much of the novel centers around a conflict between brothers James and Devon involving a car accident that leaves Devon in need of rehabilitation. As the two grow older, the conflict takes an unsettling turn when James develops diabetes and Devon refuses to donate a kidney. Eventually, Devon gets involved with the drug trade—“no one would suspect a quadriplegic student from an upper-class East Coast family of being a dealer, much less a highly competent one”—and wrestles with enduring loss in his life. If there’s a drawback here, it’s that some of the Paynes feel underutilized in the larger context.

A uniquely structured novel with memorable characters and a generational scope.

Kirkus Reviews