The Opposite of Love (review)

The daughter of a white British ex-con mother living illegally in the U.S. and an absent Jamaican father she's never met, Madge finds life as a black girl in a white Pennsylvania town all but unbearable. Her mother is brash, abrasive, uncommunicative, and she's given to disappearing for weeks on end, leaving Madge to stay with her aunt and her adult cousin, Bob, who is a journalist in nearby New York City. A short stay with Bob introduces her to the problems of the foster care system, which, combined with her own feelings of being abandoned, eventually motivate her to kidnap a four-year-old boy who appears to be severely neglected. Despite their misgivings, her mother and aunt make a home for Timmy, giving Madge time to realize the magnitude of what she's done. Meanwhile, she is plagued by racist comments and threats in school and around town, even as she finds first love with Krishna, the only other person of color in her school. The plot moves quickly, but it is decidedly purposive and message driven; the author's note leaves no doubt as to what readers are supposed to be especially agitated about when they put the book down (neglected children and the persistent presence of hate groups), and little decontextualized digs about American foreign policy won't go unnoticed either. That said, though, Madge is sufficiently troubled by her own motives in taking Timmy to mitigate a stance that's overly self-righteous, even when circumstances show her to have had the right instincts all along. The question of whether it is better to try to change the system or simply to work outside it thus gets decided by default, a plot move that merits serious post-reading discussion.