Loving Day

By: Mat Johnson

Narrated by: J. D. Jackson

Length: 12 hrs and 2 mins

Publisher's summary

On his first night in his new home, Warren spies two figures in the grass outside; when he screws up the nerve to confront them, they disappear. The next day he encounters ghosts of a different kind: In the face of the teenage girl he meets at a comics convention, he sees the mingled features of his white father and his black mother, both now dead. The girl is his daughter, and she thinks she's white.

Warren sets off to remake his life with a reluctant daughter he never knew and a haunted house and history he knows too well. In their search for a new life, they struggle with an unwanted house and its ghosts, fall in with a utopian mixed-race cult, and inspire a riot on Loving Day, the unsung holiday that celebrates interracial love.

©2015 Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. (P)2015 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Teen lit with heavy erotic imagery

This book has a great narrator who is perfectly matched to the first person narrative. His excellent interpretation is probably the only reason I finished the book rather than returning it quickly.
The character seemed more like stereotypes than people and the
situations and their responses never rang true for me. Emily Bazelon recommended this book on a podcast and I will ignore her literary suggestions in the future.

Simply wonderful.

I really enjoyed this book. I can relate to the main character. I have lived my whole life never being enough, never belonging to a tribe.

made me think about an issue that was new to me.

The supernatural part was weak and not essential to the story. Tanya and George's story was left dangling.

thoroughly entertaining

once you suspend disbelief about the set up bringing the two main characters together, you can really enjoy this book. laugh out loud funny and quite sweet

Some distracting errors but good overall.

I really appreciated a lot of the messages in this book - it’s pretty instructional. But there were two glaring issues that were really distracting for me.

1) by mistakenly and repeatedly framing Jews as “European” and not a Levantine people, some of whom were exiled to Europe, the author misses a great opportunity to illustrate the ways that many non-European immigrant groups in the US perform whiteness and uphold anti-blackness in exchange for conditional privilege. This would have been a particularly salient point in a book that touches so much on performative identity and trying to find your place in the hierarchy when you don’t fit perfect binaries.

2) The narrator mispronounces “Tal” throughout the entire book and it drives me nuts. It isn’t Tal rhyming with pal. It rhymes with Gal Gadot’s name. Closer to rhyming with ball, but not quite because it’s a Hebrew vowel that doesn’t translate perfectly.

Overall I enjoyed the book, but these two issues were definitely a distraction for me.

Race, identity & Scooby Doo

Any additional comments?

I wanted to like this book more than I did. Loving Day is a satire about personal and public views of multiracial identity. I wish the characters had more to their stories than their attitudes about being black and/or white, their failed or struggling relationships, and some Scooby Doo-style antics. The plot frustrated me, but I did enjoy Johnson's writing style and humor.

Although the emphasis on race felt claustrophobic at times, it was interesting to hear one perspective on being multiracial and being misperceived or forced to choose sides by others (even if those others are often caricatures). I know it's not fair to expect a book about multiracial identity to reflect everyone's experience in that broad domain, but I was still a bit disappointed that the story's focus only on the black/white multiracial experience and the total absence of happy interracial marriages left my family out.

At last , Real issues with gravitas and humor

The author deals with the issues related to tribalism, racism, and the need for belonging with wit and compassion.

Attention grabbing with a good story line.

Living in the city being referenced in the story bought it to life for me. The story unfolded around me. I would stop to mentally see the places. nice kob.

ONE DROP

“Loving Day” is a rambling novel about discrimination. Mat Johnson’s main character, a son of a white father and black mother, inherits a dilapidated mansion from his father who dies during its renovation. The house has many doors. Johnson creatively assembles a variety of characters who figuratively knock on those doors to define and find a way to erase discrimination.

Genetic/Socio/ethnic differences are the thematic subject of Johnson’s story. Society judges human difference as good or bad. The author’s conclusion is that people are people. Society should accept people for what they are; until then, discrimination and unequal treatment will be like an unrenovated house that will either be moved from one place to another or destroyed.

Rambling

This was like reading someone’s rambling nightmare. There were too many undeveloped topics. What was the point of the Black lady who he was no longer attracted to and husband had a white girlfriend?? The whole biracial white looking exclusive school was sad.