We Are Not Like Them: A Novel, by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza. I usually avoid women’s book club fiction, but this book’s structure and topic interested me. The two authors, a Black woman and a white woman, wrote alternating first-person chapters about the friendship between an up-and-coming Black journalist and the wife of a white Philadelphia policeman who shoots and kills an unarmed Black teenager. The story is ripped from the headlines, but the approach is from an unusual angle.
The details of the friendship feel real as written but the backstory from which it emerged feel contorted (did the white girl’s mom have to be a drug addict?) to touch all the social issues the writers seemed to want. As events involving money, lawyers, journalistic ethics, deaths, births, etc., spiral, the two women circle each other, bound by history and affection but separated by the pain of racism as it affects their experiences and expectations.
I’m not in the socioeconomic class of the white woman in this story and while I come closer to the experience of the Black woman (good schools, good career, etc.) I don’t think I could tell her story. The writing was solid and portrayed the interior of each of the women well, along with their relationships with their families and supporting cast. But I felt that stuffing so many topical issues into the single story decreased the realism and credibility of the story overall.
I took particular issue with the ending, which I can’t describe as happy so much as less sad and more hopeful than I expected. I felt that some of the relationships that survived should have broken, and that at least one of the relationships that broke should have remained intact. It was obvious to me what the authors intended but one crucial decision a character made seemed out of character: not wrong for their heart but surprising given who they were and everything we knew about them.
My discomfort with the ending might have more do to with my unfamiliarity with women’s book club fiction, or with the need to tie up all the threads that I felt were awkwardly woven into the story. I’d read another similar book by these two authors again, but I’d go in with slightly lower expectations.