Colored Television (A GMA Book Club Pick): A Novel

This was a good story, very well written, but I did not like It. Jane and her husband were INSUFFERABLE and their lives were chaotic. Whew! They stressed me clean out.

“Jane's father once told her that white people believed, deep in their hearts, that Black people would all choose to become white if they could. But Black people didn't want to be white, he had told her. They only wanted to have what white people had. He had said race was always about money, and money was always about race. That's what white people didn't understand. Black people wanted only a big yellow Victorian on the hill, not to be the white people who lived there.” See Jane run. To LA. After struggling with her mixed-race identity, her faultering self-confidence as a writer, her love for her husband and family, and her envy and longing for the high life. While comical at times, this is a satire that exposes some very uncomfortable things about the experience of being mixed race in America. It does so using some exaggerations and sterotypes, as well as with some ugly realities. It's pretty niche for writers or those who know the Hollywood Machine, but one can still learn something here.

Great writing! Jane and Lenny housesit in Brads house while Jane supposedly writes a novel while on sabbatical. Like life, nothing turns out as planned.

While I enjoyed the writing style, I was baffled by the points the author was attempting to make. For me, it's hard to read a book where the characters are not likeable. The main character here was not likeable in my view and I even found it hard to empathize with her. The book club had a robust discussion about this one.

I liked that it made you think. But Jane was not a loved character in my eyes. There were times Lenny’s words seemed too much, or just hurtful? But overall it was an ok book. Good pacing and thought provoking. Something Lenny says towards the end (about 80% in) was how I felt throughout the whole story. There were times where I’d forget this wasn’t based in the 90s, or maybe it was? Jane is a mixed race women married to a black man with mixed children. In the start I felt that we would be getting more about the children and the husband, but the story was more about Jane’s novel and her want to be rich and make a name for herself. I just felt that at times she really didn’t have her family’s interest in mind and would just do things for herself. I just couldn’t feel bad for her as she went through some tough moments. Even with her marriage there were things I feel that she shouldn’t have done. But the whole premise of the book being about “mullatos” and their struggles was at times eye opening. I could relegate to the “am I more this or more that” in my own life as a Puerto Rican woman. Am I Latina or am I black? So I understood those parts of the story, but at other times I felt like it was too much “putting yourself down cause they don’t like you anymore” kind of feel. Still a good book I’d recommend. There is slight talk of her son being autistic, but they never say what the diagnosis was. Just that he is “high functioning”. I kinda wish we got more of him and the dads pov at times.