Family Tree is the only thing I’ve read by Barbara Delinksy. It caught my eye at the bookshop, and I borrowed it to have something to read on the bus. I didn’t expect much from it, and it delivered. The plot is one that has been cropping up in a lot of mass market fiction these days: white people discover they have African-American ancestors and all hell breaks loose. Much depends on the characters in these books, and in this one, the characters are very two-dimensional. Sensitive white liberal wife from humble roots embraces the possibility of a black ancestor; well-intentioned husband struggles with elitist and latently racist family norms in an effort to accept her and their obviously multiracial newborn, and then…plot twist! It’s the husband whose grandfather was black! Except that it’s an entirely obvious development, and not twisty at all.

I suspect I might have liked the novel better had it been written by a black person, as the author might then have chosen to omit various educational dialogues wherein the wife explains to the husband that he’s a hypocrite if he champions the rights of people of color in his professional life and then shuns their acquaintanceships socially (for example). The book would also have been better without the heavy-handed symbolism in the doll-playing of the biracial little girl next door or the periodic use of ‘African American’ as a noun, rather than as an adjective, which grated on me to no end.

Basically, if you’re a well-meaning white person who’s never considered the complex history of race in the United States, the myths we tell about it, the open secrets and interrelationships that constitute our cultural history, or the possibility that social hierarchies are categorically suspect, this book is for you! Otherwise, give it a miss and read some Nella Larsen.