Loving Day: A Novel by Mat Johnson was one of those books that I just had to read because it is set in my very own neighborhood, Philadelphia’s’ Northwest section known as Germantown. Loving Day ended up inspiring me to take a walking tour around Germantown to view the many murals that reflect the neighborhood’s rich culture and history. I was not disappointed in the walk! I had no idea so much artistic expression existed around the corner from me. I was, however, a little disappointed with Loving Day. Johnson grew up in Germantown and he refers to Loving Day as semi-autobiographical. While I very much appreciate his perspective on the neighborhood, I do feel that it painted an undeservedly dismal picture of living here. However, the Germantown of today is certainly different than it was when Johnson lived here and it is changing as we speak. So, that aside, I thought Loving Day was an engaging read that makes you think about race – especially mixed race – and how race impacts not only your public, but also your personal sense of identity. All in all I enjoyed the story, butat times it seem a little too contrived, which I think took away from the underlying importance of the message.
The Novel Tourist rating: 3/5 stars
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK | NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MIAMI HERALD AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY San Francisco Chronicle • NPR • Men’s Journal • The Denver Post • Slate • The Kansas City Star • Time Out New York | From the author of the critically beloved Pym (“Imagine Kurt Vonnegut having a beer with Ralph Ellison and Jules Verne.”—Vanity Fair) comes a ruthlessly comic and moving tale of a man discovering a lost daughter, confronting an elusive ghost, and stumbling onto the possibility of utopia.
“In the ghetto there is a mansion, and it is my father’s house.”
Warren Duffy has returned to America for all the worst reasons: His marriage to a beautiful Welsh woman has come apart; his comics shop in Cardiff has failed; and his Irish American father has died, bequeathing to Warren his last possession, a roofless, half-renovated mansion in the heart of black Philadelphia. On his first night in his new home, Warren spies two figures outside in the grass. When he screws up the nerve to confront them, they disappear. The next day he encounters ghosts of a different kind: In the face of a teenage girl he meets at a comics convention he sees the mingled features of his white father and his black mother, both now dead. The girl, Tal, is his daughter, and she’s been raised to think she’s white.
Spinning from these revelations, Warren sets off to remake his life with a reluctant daughter he’s never known, in a haunted house with a history he knows too well. In their search for a new life, he and Tal struggle with ghosts, fall in with a utopian mixed-race cult, and ignite a riot on Loving Day, the unsung holiday for interracial lovers.
A frequently hilarious, surprisingly moving story about blacks and whites, fathers and daughters, the living and the dead, Loving Day celebrates the wonders of opposites bound in love.