A mesmerizing tale of a small-town young woman’s valiant, misguided scheme to combat white supremacist violence. In Rubin's gripping account, anti-Black racism, antisemitism, and xenophobia are terrifyingly present, not only out in the world, but within homes and families. Set in Canada in the 1990s, this surprising yet familiar story echoes back to the 1930s and 40s and ahead to our own troubled times.”
—Doris L. Bergen, author of War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust
“In this bold debut, Rubin delivers readers to the fringes of society where we find an unflinching story of the things we learn, the things we unlearn—and ultimately, the power of love, family and redemption.”
—Karen Green, author of Yellow Birds
“Every action humans take plants a seed. WHITE brilliantly explores the yield of such seeds—good, bad, and ugly. While hate can be cultivated and passed from generation to generation, it can also be dispelled when the right people come into our lives at the right times.”
—Arno Michaelis, Author of My Life After Hate, Co-Author of The Gift of Our Wounds
“A bold and brave novel about the dangers of both loyalty and betrayal when the family and community we love are bonded by negative values that hurt other people and the world. Using the frame of Canadian white supremacy, Aviva Rubin brings us inside the conflicted heart and mind of one young woman who finally makes the break and decides, at great personal cost, to say No.”
—Sarah Schulman, Author
“Aviva Rubin eloquently captures a young woman’s struggle with the intergenerational trauma of hate. While Sarah Cartell fights for a different world from the one she was raised to believe in, she feels unworthy of it. With humour and compassion, WHITE shines a light on the complex and transformative powers of family, friendship, speaking one’s truth.”
—Paula Klein, Psychotherapist
“Brave, moving, and fierce, WHITE shows us the deep rot of a family’s white supremacist beliefs and a fearless daughter’s plan to infiltrate the racist groups she wants to bring down. Taut and compulsively readable, Aviva Rubin’s debut novel is as much a sharp psychological portrait of generational racism as it is an unflinching look at the realities and limitations of hope and change.”
—Laura Zigman, bestselling author of Separation Anxiety and Small World
2024-09-11
Driven to somehow expunge the stain of her racist upbringing, a young woman from a white supremacist family dedicates her entire life to becoming the ultimate double agent.
It’s not surprising that the Nazi-loving male figures in Rubin’s “near historical fiction novel” (set in the years prior to the Oklahoma City bombing) are terrible husbands, fathers, brothers, and uncles. Sarah Cartell, the earnest protagonist in the eye of this storm of would-be stormtroopers, already understands this by the time she’s 8 years old and is sentenced along with her siblings to do penance on the rocky shores of “kneeling beach.” The kids’ crime? “Mixing” with a boy new to Goderich, Ontario, named Curtis Otonga, the son of a Nigerian doctor now working as a janitor at the local grade school. Sarah’s trespasses continue when, at 14, she and Curtis secretly become an item and she lands a job assisting the neighborhood librarian, Mrs. Broder. The librarian takes young Sara under her wing and reveals the awful truth about the girl’s Holocaust-denying “Grandpa” Thomas Cartell. Determined to not only escape the Cartell clan but also to thwart it, Sarah heads off to McGill University in Montreal on a mission to bring the white supremacists down before they and their clandestine network of skinheads and Nazi sympathizers can cause more harm. She does her best to break through the walls she’s erected around herself and manages to form close friendships with the very kind of people the Cartells abhor. But the increasing stress of being both a progressive university student and an undercover faux Nazi ultimately becomes too much for Sarah to manage, and she finds herself committed to the Sunnyside Mental Health Centre under the care of Mona Rubinoff, who helps Sarah deal with the painful familial complexities inherent in being one of the Cartell clan’s unhappy progeny.
Rubin excels at keeping the humanity tied up in Sarah’s thorny situation front and center. Although committed to confronting the Cartell’s ignorant brand of evil head on, Sarah cannot simply eliminate the familial bonds that she shares with them—no matter how much she loathes their tainted worldview. Sarah can’t even reconcile the animal attraction she feels for her boyfriend Marc and her absolute revulsion regarding every sickening racist thing he advocates. The increasing angst and turmoil roiling inside Sarah’s slight 104-pound frame is rendered with startling realness, only increasing as the young woman further pursues her life’s mission. The author achieves this level of authenticity through the use of lean prose and stark dialogue, which often crackles with the energy of exchanges in a John Cassavetes movie. Readers are practically airdropped into Goderich, Ontario, to meet young Sarah Cartell in summer of 1982 and continue on with her all the way to the Sunnyside Mental Health Centre in the mid-1990s; the “in the moment” feeling Rubin achieves is even more impressive when considering that the dark back story of the Cartell men (and two women who managed to escape their hateful existence) runs concurrently throughout Sarah’s intense journey.
A provocative exploration of the ties that bind and the mad hatred that kills.
