Almost Brown

January 1, 2023

An award-winning Canadian author whose tree-planting memoir, Eating Dirt, was a No. 1 national best seller in Canada, Gill returns with another memoir, this time plumbing her life as the daughter of an Indian father and English mother who met and married in 1960s London. The obstacles her parents faced at the time (not so open to interracial unions) and issues she faced growing up--what does the social construct person of color mean for her, and why does she sometimes feel distant from her father?--are delineated here.

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April 15, 2023
A biracial writer uses her father's story to interpret her own. Gill was born in London, but she grew up in a small town in upstate New York where everyone knew her biracial family's story. When her father, who was born in India but grew up in Kenya, married her Catholic English mother, his family disowned him for marrying a "white bride." This estrangement, combined with Gill's father's intensely gendered household rules, led her to support her mother during the couple's subsequent divorce. "At the time, it didn't really seem like a choice between white and brown so much as a preference for Mom over Dad....It wasn't sim-ply a question of skin, or belonging, or the Englishness of Mom, or the Indianness of Dad, or some murky middle state in between," writes the author. "It had become a curry of emotion and allegiance and identity, everything cooked together, all at once." Gill spent years not speaking to her father, which heightened confusion about her racial identity. The author wonders, "What does it mean to be brown?" and notes that her Punjabi cousins, whom she considers racial role models, lack the "singsong accents or delightful head wobbles or any other mango-infused idiosyncrasies often attributed to Indians." When asked to outline her "diversity practices" for a job interview, Gill admits that she considers diversity "some deeply flawed bullshit," and she worries that admitting to her biracial identity might lead to her stealing a job from "some better-qualified, normal, non-diverse person." While the author never seemed to fully resolve issues about her identity, she reconciled with her father. The book's strongest sections depict the evolution of Gill's relationship with her father and explain the historical context that shaped her parents' lives. Unfortunately, her analysis of her biracial identity is problematically superficial and outdated, and her memoirlike sections are overly descriptive but inadequately circumspect. A largely disappointing memoir from a biracial immigrant.

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May 1, 2023
This moving memoir from Gill (Eating Dirt) explores her experiences as a self-described “Indo-Saxon”—the daughter of a Punjabi Sikh man and a British woman—navigating tumultuous family relationships and feelings of cultural rootlessness. Raised in Canada and the U.S. by immigrant parents who struggled to understand both cultures, Gill ably addresses the cultural and racial tensions she faced inside and outside her home, especially those driven by her father, whose own upbringing in India and Kenya instilled beliefs that felt antithetical to the family’s American lifestyle (he “hit the ceiling” when Gill got her ears pierced). As a teen, Gill’s father abandoned the family and they fell out of touch for several years before reconnecting when she was an adult. In lyrical, near-poetic prose, Gill uses their relationship as a springboard to touch on themes of belonging and identity-making relevant to anyone who has ever struggled to place themselves within their own lineage. “I didn’t understand that we were a cup poured into a tide of generational wavelets, people leaving and starting over, each paying the toll in a new world by giving up a little bit of the old one,” Gill writes. Readers should expect to have their heartstrings tugged. Agent: Samantha Haywood, Transatlantic.

June 1, 2023
Fiction and nonfiction author Gill (Eating Dirt, 2012) explores her parents' marriage, her own biracial identity, and the legacies she carries. Gill's father, born to a Sikh family in India and raised in Kenya--a British colony at the time--moved to London in the 1960s for medical school and met Gill's mother, a white, Catholic, Englishwoman who was studying anesthesiology. Their marriage destroyed Gill's parents' relationships with their own parents. After Gill and her twin brother were born, the family moved to Toronto and then upstate New York in search of less discrimination and better career options. Gill weaves the story of her childhood in New York, where her mother ran the household operations as her father dipped in and out of home life as a fearsome patriarch. They divorced when the author was in high school, representing the beginning of Gill's decades-long drift from her father. Written with an eye for detail and character, Almost Brown is a moving examination of family, history, and the connections that endure.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

March 1, 2023

Gill (Eating Dirt) recalls her upbringing as the daughter of a white English mother and an Indian father in this memoir. The author begins the book with her parents, who met in London as young doctors in the 1960s and married. Neither of their parents were pleased; her paternal grandfather stopped speaking to her father for decades. Alone in the world and with a growing family, the Gills moved from London to Canada and then to the U.S., where the differences between their personalities and years of fiscal misspending caused a rift in the marriage. Shortly after her parents' divorce, Charlotte grew weary of her father's ideas about her college plans, and they became estranged. Intermingled are histories about biracial relations globally, plus the author's thoughts about being biracial. Some information, such as the colonization of India, flows seamlessly with whatever is happening in her life. However, other insights seem to come out of nowhere, especially in later chapters. VERDICT The discombobulation detracts from both the family storyline and some of the messages conveyed about discrimination directed toward biracial and multiracial people. Regardless, this book is still worth a read.--Anjelica Rufus-Barnes

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.