This book reminded me of a patchwork quilt with messy seams. The potential was there, but it just didn't pull together for me.

(SPOILERS BELOW)

The book is heavily billed using Obama's name, but I really felt like the mentions were totally unnecessary. Every so often, there would be a name drop, but there wasn't anything about it that was ultimately critical to the story. It only served to let the reader know where we were in time, and there were certainly other ways to go about that. There were also probably more ways to play that up, but the Obama angle fizzled for me.

I understand that maybe Ruth didn't owe Xavier any explanations about her reluctance to have kids and especially not the fact that she'd already had one, but that's kind of a big thing. I understand why he was upset.

What I didn't understand at all was how she went from really not caring about having kids and being focused on her career to getting into a fight with her husband and then ending up back in her hometown completely intent on finding the baby she'd given birth to when she was 17 because she suddenly felt entitled to him. I truly couldn't tell if the character hadn't considered everything that came along with that, or if the author didn't either. One minute we're hearing about how she whispered "I hate you" to the baby and the next minute it's HER son and she seems to think she's just going to waltz into town and claim him back because the adoption was probably not real. Huh? She also goes to see her former best friend Natasha whom she hasn't spoken to or seen in 12 years. And then all of a sudden they're just best friends again. Natasha is mad for a minute, but then she enables Ruth.

The time frame is also confusing. She's back in Ganton for a week, maybe just a little bit more, but in that time, she's managed to become best friends with Midnight, the white grandson of an old family friend. As if to remind us that she is a mother without her son, Midnight is a son without his mother, who died during childbirth. He feels neglected by his father who is struggling to get on his feet, and he takes a liking to Miss Ruth because she mothers him in a way that he's been missing since his own mother died. How does all this happen so fast? And there again, it seems so convenient that she just that quickly develops some kind of maternal instinct now that she's decided to embrace motherhood -- but only where HER son is concerned.

Further refusing to mind her own business, while she's on an extended trip away from and in a silent fight with her husband, Ruth decides it would be a good time to tell her brother's wife Cassie that he's struggling and needs her by his side. Magically this fixes everything in Eli and Cassie's relationship. Literally they're together always after that. It flattened that dynamic so much that it felt useless to even mention it.

The longer the book went on, the more annoyed I got with Ruth. She was so selfish and self-centered. Every once in awhile she would have some kind of lightbulb moment where she would realize how much was done to give her the clearest path forward to success, but then she'd just sort of say "well that was nice" and keep bulldozing her way into other people's lives and business.

Just by virtue of hanging out with Midnight, she learns about his best friend Corey, who happens to be black. Super conveniently, she discovers that Corey has a birthmark on his face for everyone to see, JUST LIKE HER BABY. It felt way too easy.

Midnight gets angry at Corey for having the kind of life that Midnight can never have because he doesn't have parents who love him or a nice house or money for nice things (in contrast to Ruth, he seems to be always grateful for whatever he can get from his family because he knows they struggle). He gets especially angry when he (also super conveniently) overhears his grandmother mention to his dad that Ruth is Corey's real mother. So naturally, he runs away and decides he's going to work with a gang selling candy bars at school (I have no idea what that gang was all about but those scenes with the gang members were hard to believe because while I believe they prey on young kids, they seemed more like two weirdos hanging out in alleys trying to recruit the kids to join their MLM or something). He convinces Corey to run away with him for a while and he does, but when he tries to convince Corey that he should sell the candy bars with L-Boogie too, but Corey is like "uh, no, I'm not joining a gang with you."

So after they've been missing and hiding for about 24 hours and Corey has refused to join L-Boogie's MLM scheme gang, Midnight takes him out to the Wabash River and lets him play with his air soft pellet gun. The one that the orange tab just happened to fall off of. And then he texts Ruth and tells her where they are. And then he calls 911 and reports a guy with a gun.

The police show up and find an 11 year old black boy waving a gun around. They pull their guns on him. Ruth shows up. She's so angry at Midnight but she's more worried about Corey because HER SON. Her son who has a family he loves and doesn't know he was adopted. Her son who has never met her before.

And so she goes to him and she just drops this bomb on him that she's his real mother. He does not respond well. Like WTF did she think was going to happen? At this point in the book I was so enraged at how selfish Ruth is that I almost threw the book across the room and didn't finish it. You don't just get to drop news like that on someone to unburden yourself just because your husband is mad at you and you decided a week ago that you're really interested in finding out what happened to the baby you had and told that you hated it 11 years ago.

But even the climax of the book just fell flat. And when it was over, the rest of it seemed to drag. We get to New Years and SURPRISE! Xavier, Ruth's husband, shows up on the doorstep at her grandmother's house. Because despite having only met her family I think one time, he somehow is able to get in touch with them and arrange a surprise visit.

And the conflict at the beginning of the book, which is whether Ruth and Xavier will start their own family, is not resolved.

By comparison, the dynamic between Corey and Midnight was actually a much more interesting and nuanced discussion of the intersectionality of race and class, in my opinion. I would have enjoyed the book a lot more, I think, if it had focused on that relationship dynamic. I don't know if Ruth was written to be so unlikable or not. I've read plenty of books with unlikable characters but I truly couldn't stand her by the time she tells Corey that she's his birth mother. Like she never thinks about anyone else but herself.

Like I said at the beginning of the review, all the pieces were there and this could have been a really wonderful story about race and class and even motherhood, but the seams were messy. You've got this piece here and that piece there but the transitions just weren't smooth enough to bring them together as well as they could.

It's a debut novel and writing is hard. I think the author had a big idea and it was a grand one. It was hard to achieve. I don't fault the author for it. If anything, the book could have benefited from a better editor to help smooth out those spots where it felt rough and disjointed.