What We Lose is hauntingly good. After experiencing grief myself, I highly identify with Thandie, our protagonist. Grief can be such a perilous emotion, and we readers get to see how Thandie remembers her mother and reflect on what she learns about life, death, and herself after such an important loss. Hence the title. Writing this review took me longer than ever because I felt this novel deeply. I cannot articulate accurately my feelings and thoughts about this book, which is why this is so short. But, I can emphatically say this: You should read this novel. Now. Seriously.



I received this book from NetGalley to read and review.

This book takes on the complex issues of colorism, race, health, and identity. It takes on all of these very heavy topics in less than 225 pages. I listened to the audiobook and I read a print copy of the book. I will not discourage you from listening to the audiobook, but reading the print copy is imperative. I had a whole different understanding of the book in reading the physical copy. The formatting of this book is its strength and adds layers of meaning to the text. Clemmons has included photos and charts throughout the novel, giving it the feeling of a narrative nonfiction. The text often reads like a memoir and I frequently had to remind myself that this is a work of fiction. The writing is lush and stunning.

Thandi is the product of a "colored" South African mother and an African American father. She craves African American culture yet feels very much outside of it. She longs for close black friendships in her stiflingly lonely community lacking in diversity, but is warned by her mother that she will be hated by darker skinned girls because of her light complexion. Her mother is full of advice for her daughter. Her mother advises Thandi to straighten her hair - believing pressed locs to be more beautiful. She teaches her daughter to roast a chicken in order to seduce a man, and advises her daughter on what physical characteristics to look for in order to avoid a weak man. Thandi's mother is a force. And when she is diagnosed with cancer, her illness and the aftermath of her death leaves Thandi overwhelmed and reeling into an abyss of loneliness.

This book is steamy. From her first sexual encounter, to listening to her parents making love, to finding herself in a random illicit affair - Thandi explores her sexuality in her loneliness, her encounters a kind of last grab at life. Thandi's observations about her marriage are devastating. If someone writes about you what Thandi writes about her husband, abort the relationship immediately.

Perhaps the most touching and emotional parts of the book are reserved for Thandi's exploration of her mother's cancer and discovering the prevalence of cancer in the African American community. It shocks Thandi that at her mother's doctor's visits so many of the patients are brown and what she perceives to be poor.

Ultimately, this is a very brave debut written in beautiful prose. This was a great book for a book club discussion. There was a lot to talk about. If you'd like to discuss this book with your own book club, feel free to use this discussion guide.

This was a quick read but a confusing one. I feel like the description led me to expect a pretty straight forward novel about a South African childhood and loss. Instead it reads like a braided essay in longform, a memoir of sorts, with attempts to pull in other information. But it also feels unfinished, with several more revisions needed to really make the transitions work, to bring the emotion in balance with the events, to flesh out a better level of detail of the actual events making up the "novel." It reads more like a summary much of the time, an overview, rather than a series of events that come together for an actual story.

I respond to emotion in writing, when it is presented in a way that brings me into the story. I expected this to have incredible resonance since I recently lost a parent to cancer. But I felt like an outsider the entire time. There is something about the way that the internal aspects of the story are presented that don't welcome you, rather they leave you wanting to turn away.

I wanted to like this book so much. I had so many high expectations about it. I liked to idea of the story and the blurb I read on goodreads about it just caught my attention. I've tried to hard to like it, I read 100 pages and then I had to stop reading.The language is so bad and the way the story is put into words is awful.I feel like I am reading a paper written by an 11 years old student who is doing his/her best to write a story by using simple and direct sentences.

I loved this book. At first I wasn't sure if it truly a novel or a personal essay. It is a novel, a beautiful well-written debut about personal growth, family, mother-daughter relationship, death, grief and motherhood and friendships.

Clemmons truly captured the sense of being completely unmoored after the passing of someone loved and needed. This novel brought back so many feelings and experiences that have had in this last decade of adjusting to life without my grandmother. Highly recommended.

Sadly, this book was not for me. Although the novel touched on important issues like race, identity and - most of all - grief, the execution was not convincing. The story and characters both remained fragmented and superficial.

I truly loved this book. It is very short, but Zinzi Clemmons manages to pack a lot of emotion into a small package. What We Lose has very little plot, and follows the story of Thandi, the daughter of a South African woman of mixed race, and an African American man, growing up in Philadelphia. We follow her through her struggles with her race - not feeling fully welcome in black or white circles - the illness and eventual death of her mother, her female friendships, her relationships with a handful of lovers, and other basic mundane life experiences.
She is written with such clarity of voice, that it is really easy to get a sense of her as a character. It is also rather sensual. It deals with issues of grief, sex, race and family beautifully.
Highly recommended.

This is perhaps more a meditation on loss and identity than a straightforward novel--I don't know anything about the author but this book feels very personal. It centers on a young woman, whose South African mother has recently died of cancer. That is basically it! I didn't love the narrative voice here--it felt too matter of fact, maybe, to really draw me in--but the character felt real. B+.

This book is about so many things; race, love, loss, family, and most of all grief and how it impacts those left behind. It's beautifully written prose with rich, complex, interesting characters that feel like you're reading a memoir.

I had many things I wanted to say. Some sleepless nights ago, I’d made a list of all the things I needed to apologize for, all the things I needed to tell her I forgave her for. But as I stood there with those mathematics in hand, the weight of the moment on me, I said nothing. And when I tried to speak, only tears came. The pain was exponential. Because as much as I cried, she could not comfort me, and this fact only multiplied my pain. I realized that this would be life; to figure out how to live without her hand on my back; her soft, accented English telling me, everything will be all right, Thandi. This was the paradox: How would I ever heal from losing the person who healed me? The question was so enormous that I could see only my entire life, everything I know, filling it.
What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons is a brief but sweeping and enveloping tale of race and femininity, illness and death, love, both romantic and familial, and loss. Reading like the pages of a journal- the intimacy of the narrative shines like a prism of emotion, you will feel every sentiment deeply.

Thandi is a paradox as her light-skinned Black appearance ousts her from acceptance by either race, Black or White, in this instance. Growing up first in newly post-apartheid South Africa and then later on the East coast of America, she struggles to navigate the tricky labels of race which is further complicated by her family's prosperity and class standing.

But when I called myself black, my cousins looked at me askance. They are what is called coloured in South Africa— mixed race— and my father is light-skinned black. I looked just like my relatives, but calling myself black was wrong to them. Though American blacks were cool, South African blacks were ordinary, yet dangerous. It was something they didn’t want to be.
When her family relocates to Philadelphia, Thandi relishes in the opportunity to shed the fear she so secretly harbored for her birthplace- the constant bumping-up-against of the poor to the wealthy left her petrified of the possible outcomes.

This situation— the close proximity and daily interaction of the ever stratifying classes— has led to the country’s new postapartheid violence.
With slightly renewed optimism brought on by the new environment, Thandi seeks refuge in the groups of Blacks she and her peers so idolized in South Africa. Yet again, she discovers that her skin-color and social status leave her rigidly balancing on a fine line unable to find somewhere to settle.

American blacks were my precarious homeland— because of my light skin and foreign roots, I was never fully accepted by any race. Plus my family had money, and all the black kids in my town came from the poorer areas. I was friends with the kids who lived on my block and were in my honors classes— white kids. I was a strange in-betweener.
As she grows she slowly begins to uncover the truth and indelible nature of her situation and with this precious knowledge she is able to take some level of ownership of it.

I’ve often thought that being a light-skinned black woman is like being a well-dressed person who is also homeless. You may be able to pass in mainstream society, appearing acceptable to others, even desired. But in reality you have nowhere to rest, nowhere to feel safe. Even while you’re out in public, feeling fine and free, inside you cannot shake the feeling of rootlessness. Others may even envy you, but this masks the fact that at night, there is nowhere safe for you, no place to call your own.
Paired with this narrative is the illness that slowly wrings her mother of her vitality and spirit. Weaved together, these two stories balance one another to create a 360 degree view of Thandi and all that composes her. At the forefront of it all is the fact that her mother is dying from cancer which is complicated by the obscured fact that Black people often receive sub-par care resulting in a higher mortality rate.

What I felt was extremely uncomfortable, and she would have resented me for it; as much as she has suffered, many other people were suffering worse. Her disease only reinforced how the world saw us: not black or white, not American or African, not poor or rich. We were confined to the middle, and would always be. As hard as she tried to separate herself from the binds of apartheid, we were still within its grip. It had become the indelible truth of our lives, and nothing- not sickness, not suffering, not death- could change that.
When the inevitable occurs, Thandi is propelled into the unknown world of grief and endeavors to trudge through the haze of loss. In an attempt to renew feeling, she throws herself into a veritable trade of experiences each one leaving her simultaneously broken and healed.

With Peter, at least some part of me is attempting to parse these experiences, to separate the liminal from mundane, from my baseline. I need an anchor so that I’m not living so close to death anymore. I need to believe in life again. Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing. I don’t sleep for two nights. Instead I am wide awake and tossing. Each day I feel less like the person I was the day before, my body hurtling so fast in one direction that my mind cannot keep pace. I can scarcely remember who I was before my body became like this.
Slowly, she digs her way out from under the crushing weight of grief. Like a phoenix from the ashes she must now learn how to tackle life and all that it is prepared to throw at her from the position where she now resides.

I didn't know how to place this new mother, my dead mother, with the mother who was alive. When I look at her grave, I feel it the most. How can she be there when she is still here, inside me? My mother is dead. But I still see her. But I can still feel her. I can still hear her voice, even right now as I am speaking to you. But she is dead.
What We Lose is much larger than it's limit page count alludes to. Drawing from personal insight, Clemmons crafts an exacting, philosophical, and profound tale of the consuming nature of loss, whether it be that of an ideal, a culture, or a loved one.

I thought about how every place on earth contained its tragedies, love stories, people surviving and others falling, and for this reason, from far enough of a distance and under enough darkness, they were all essentially the same.

The narrator's voice is honest, straightforward, and heartbreaking--this is a lovely short novel that stays with you long after you've finished it.