Raceless

November 23, 2020
Journalist Lawton explores questions of belonging, racial identity, and family secrets in her shattering debut. Throughout grade school and her teen years, her friends questioned why she, the daughter of white parents, had brown skin and kinky hair, yet her mother refused to discuss the truth about her paternity. Following her father’s death, Lawton bought a DNA test, the results of which led her to uncover her mother’s infidelity with a Black man, which she revealed in a shocking confession and caused a falling-out between them. The heart of the book chronicles the aftermath, as Lawton, with the help of friends and therapists, blossoms emotionally and professionally despite her psychological struggles, in time becoming a Guardian columnist and traveling across the world. Lawton builds a strong story around her attainment of emotional balance and her quest for identity and belonging. At turns revelatory and profound, this memoir sings.

December 1, 2020
Lawton, a columnist for The Guardian, was raised as white, with a white English father and a white Irish mother. She often questioned why she looked different from her immediate family, but her parents never discussed race with her, instead explaining her darker skin and curly hair with stories about distant relatives whose genes had skipped some generations. After losing her father to cancer when she was in her early twenties, Lawton took a DNA test that showed she was not his biological daughter. The results forced her mother to admit that Lawton had been conceived through a one-night infidelity with a Black Irishman. Destabilized by the revelation, Lawton grapples with her identity while grieving her father. In her debut memoir, Lawton reflects on the difficulty of reconciling her loving parents with their deeply buried family secret and the resulting erasure of her racial identity throughout her childhood. With writing that at times reads casually, like a personal blog, Lawton's examination of identity and family is a compelling account that will resonate with many readers.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

December 15, 2020
An intimate story about the meaning of family and the subjectivity of race. In her debut memoir, Guardian columnist Lawton offers a unique perspective on identity and family in an era of racial awakening. The author guides readers through her childhood as a mixed-race girl raised by two White parents who insisted that her darker skin was the product of a so-called "throwback gene." After the death of her father, Lawton took a DNA test that forced her to confront why her Blackness was always treated as a burden instead of a self-evident truth. "I was an inquisitive child with an anti-authoritarian streak that would rear its head at inopportune times, but which was probably linked to the fact that my very existence was contradictory and nonsensical," she writes. "I was looking to find my place in the world around me." As she tells her personal story, the author weaves in discussions of such relevant concepts as transracial identity, Afro-futurism and the importance of Black hair, without assuming that readers are familiar with any of them. She helpfully situates her epiphanies about identity within the robust canon of contemporary Black thinkers, from bell hooks to Zora Neale Hurston to Solange. But the book isn't just a passive examination of race. Lawton uprooted her life in search of community, traveling to Cuba, Nicaragua, Morocco, and Vietnam. The book is sure to resonate with those who have had to negotiate their existence in the "in-between" or who possess identities that defy old-fashioned, traditional norms. Lawton gives herself, and others, permission to contain multitudes. "Being yourself," she writes, "is easier once you free yourself from the baggage of other people's expectations, when you look in the mirror and accept that the person staring back at you is a culmination of everything you have always wanted to be." A timely, engaging exploration of family and racial belonging featuring many valuable lessons.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 1, 2021

A Black woman raised in a white family, Lawton embarks on a journey to discover her identity, and in doing so confronts centuries-old systems of global white supremacy and oppression. Lawton writes about the exhaustion she experienced growing up, balancing the intersections of being loved, yet not understood, seen yet also unseen, and of constant code-switching. After her father dies and she has a series of DNA tests, Lawton tries, not for the first time, to have this difficult conversation with her mother. Failing that, she starts traveling for freelance journalism assignments, along the way meeting several others struggling with being misidentified like her, on a similar search of their own. Lawton finds that racism is prevalent everywhere, expressed differently according to the local culture. After she returns to her native London, she begins therapy to try and mend her relationship with her mother, knitting all the pieces of herself together at last. Grateful for her discovery, Lawton also discusses the history of modern DNA testing, including its negative uses. VERDICT A frank examination of one woman's search for identity that will satisfy readers of personal narratives and Black history alike.--Venessa Hughes, Denver

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