Early Reviewers Jess Row

One afternoon, not long after Kelly Thorndike has moved back to his hometown of Baltimore, an African American man he doesn't recognize calls out to him. To Kelly’s shock, the man identifies himself as Martin, the skinny white Jewish kid from his high school band. Martin—if it is indeed him—then tells him an astonishing story: after years of listening to hip hop and immersing himself in black culture, believing himself to be “a black man in a white man’s body,” he’s had a plastic surgeon perform “racial reassignment surgery”: altering Martin’s hair, skin, and physiognomy to allow him to pass as African American. Unknown to his family or friends from the past, Martin has been living a new life ever since. Now, however, Martin has grown to feel that he can no longer keep the secret of his new identity a secret; he wants Kelly, one of the only remaining connections to his previous life, to take his story public. Kelly, still recovering from the death of his wife and child and looking for a way to begin a new life, agrees, and things quickly begin to spiral out of control. Inventive and thought-provoking, Row has written a brilliant novel about cultural and racial alienation and the nature of belonging in a global world.