Thicker Than Blood

by Jan English Leary

Overview

Andrea Barton is single but wants a child. When an infant is abandoned at a church on the north side of Chicago, Andrea first becomes a foster mother and then adopts her. Andrea believes that love and her experience as a social worker will see her through the challenges of raising an African-American child in a white world. During Pearl's childhood, Andrea is able to protect her daughter from many of society's blows. But when teenaged Pearl starts to seek her own identity, their relationship is threatened. Both mother and daughter face situations that force them to confront the possibilities and limits of love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781942515128
Publisher:	Fomite
Publication date:	05/29/2015
Pages:	302
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.68(d)

About the Author

Jan English Leary grew up in the Midwest and Central New York State. During her junior year at Smith College, she studied in Paris, an experience which fostered the love of travel that runs through her fiction. She received an M.A. in French Literature at Brown. While teaching French and raising her children, she completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts. For the remainder of her career she taught fiction writing at Francis W. Parker School in Chicago and at Northwestern University. Her short fiction has appeared inPleiades, The Literary Review, The Minnesota Review, Carve Magazine, andLong Story, Short Literary Journal and other publications. She has received three Illinois Arts Council Awards. She lives in Chicago with her husband, John, an artist and former teacher. Thicker Than Bloodis her first novel.

Editorial Reviews

2015-07-30
When familial love and loyalty collide with racism and classism, tensions mount. Leary's debut novel examines the ties that bind three generations of women in the Barton family—and the divisions that keep them apart. Nancy is the family matriarch, a stern woman with clear ideas about propriety. Her two daughters are polar opposites. Andrea is single, a Chicago-based social worker who deals with refugees and lives in a cramped apartment with her adopted daughter, Pearl. Joanne is a suburban, married, stay-at-home mom. That Pearl is African-American and the Bartons white gives the novel multiple issues to grapple with and raises important concerns about transracial adoption. Unfortunately, the book is only partially successful. Pearl is a cliché—a self-sabotaging, angry black girl who acts out sexually—and Andrea is so clueless she's almost a caricature. In one particularly glaring scene, she asks teenage Pearl if her friends are in a gang. What's more, there are plotlines that sputter. For one, Nancy has kept a huge personal secret for most of her life. As readers, we're in on it, but it's unclear if her daughters discover their mother's hidden past when they rifle through her papers after her death. That this is left unresolved is unfortunate. Still, the novel exposes class antagonisms in the tony private school Pearl attends with cringe-worthy accuracy. Similarly, its portrait of a mixed-race family illustrates the parallel worlds inhabited by black and white Americans and the damage that needs to be repaired before we can truly call ourselves a post-racial country. A timely but ultimately disappointing family drama.

Kirkus Reviews