Your Face in Mine

Your Face in Mine begins with the narrator's encounter with an old friend transformed: a white man who has become, through surgery and chemistry, a black man. It's the old Black Like Me premise, but Row quickly puts it through some very modern changes for our era of ubiquitous plastic surgery and global cultural exchange. Some of these paths are thoroughly pursued and others merely provocative, but the best thing about the book—for me at least—was the way Row keeps turning over our ideas of race and culture, of individual choice and technological capability, leaving them even more unsettled than when his story began. —Tom
(P.S. You can read a thoughtful essay of Row's about how he came to write the novel, and about a favorite book of his own, James Baldwin's Another Country.)