Notes on her color A novel

A year out of high school, Gabrielle has only known the cold, patriarchal system of her household. She and her mother, Tallulah, have a unique ability: they can change the color of their skin. Gabrielle learns to keep her skin white to appease her father, matching their white walls, white cupboards, and even the pale food they eat. This secret keeps Gabrielle and Tallulah close despite differing values. After years of being oppressed by her husband, Tallulah suffers a mental breakdown and tries to kill herself, forcing Gabrielle to own her power and become more independent for the first time. Music is the one area where Gabrielle has always been able to express herself, and her piano teacher, a queer, dark-skinned, confident woman--everything her father abhors--encourages Gabrielle's creativity and helps her to open up and grow into her own identity. In this coming-of-age debut, exceptional storyteller Neal paints a picture of racism and patriarchy in suburban Florida and one young woman's journey to break free from it all.

A young woman who can change her skin color searches for belonging and freedom from a difficult home life through music. "My mother could change the color of her skin": Gabrielle, the narrator, has inherited this gift, which she calls "passing." Gabrielle is about to graduate from high school in Florida as the novel opens, and though her color-changing has been largely out of her control, she's managed to keep her condition unnoticed by everyone but her parents. Her father, a Black lawyer with aspirations to be the perfect Republican, prefers that both Gabrielle and her mother (who is Black and Indigenous) pass as White when he gets home from work, to match their house's all-white interior. "There were no dark things allowed in our home--except for whiskey, and him," Gabrielle tells us. When Gabrielle's father decides she should be pre-med at the University of Florida--"It's very competitive," a campus tour guide tells them. "But it's a great program"--he demands she take a year off after high school to work on her extracurricular activities, giving her a better shot at admission. She begins taking piano lessons from Dominique, a young Jamaican woman whose brightly colored home and vibrant family life are everything Gabrielle wishes her own could be. Organized into parts corresponding to movements in Mahler's Symphony No. 3, Neal's narrative takes us through Gabrielle's struggle to understand who she truly is and what she wants at the same time that her family irrevocably shatters. Like Gabrielle herself, though, the novel never quite settles on how to present itself, and many questions of narrative logic--characters' motivations and histories, how Gabrielle's passing works--go unanswered. Falls short of a magnum opus but with enough lovely notes to make it worth a look. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.