I see this book listed by some as YA and though it may be a coming of age story in some ways, I would not classify it as YA myself. If that's how the publisher is marketing it, it's going to turn away the type of readers that would end up loving this book. There are no quotes, little indication of who is speaking, the "n-word" thrown all over the place, and a constant shift between 2 timelines. I would say it's very much adult literary fiction from the eyes of a child and teenager. But what do I know?

The book follows a boy name Huey Fairchild. Switching between Huey at the age of 8 in 1960's Georgia and as a teen in the 1970's New York City, the reader sees the impact of the Civil Rights movement on a child. 8 year old 1960's Huey witnesses the Freedom Riders coming to his small town and the townspeople rejection of the idea of integration and of anyone they see as accepting of black people (referred to in much more racist terms in the book). Teenage 1970's Huey wants no part of his past in his new image as he attends Claremont Prep, a prestigious NYC high school. But there's no way to escape one's past in the long run.

It's best to go into this book knowing nothing. Honestly. The blurb on the back gives away something that I think is HUGE and that the reader would be better off not knowing going into the book. I'm not sure that the reader knowing that fact is important going into it and I think there's a greater impact as it comes out in the story.

<spoiler>Huey being bi-racial plays a HUGE part of the book. While it's obvious at some point, it's clearly a slow reveal to the reader. Huey's denial, his racist actions throughout the book, and his mom's speech at the end are elements of this book that really make it stand out. To know that he's bi-racial from the start takes away something. It's obvious his dad is hiding the fact that the pool is closed because of him. It's obvious that Toby is a relative. Had I not known going in that Huey was bi-racial, this slow obvious reveal would have meant so much more. </spoiler>


Huey as a teenager is unbearable. The 1960's story line is obviously the stronger of the two and is the foundation for what's going on in the 1970's. By starting the book with 1970's Huey, is having faith that the reader's attention will be grabbed and interested enough to stick around. Had the 1960's POV not come when it did, this would have been a firm DNF. Maybe that's why the above mentioned spoiler is in the blurb? To keep people reading? Once that storyline gets going, it's hard to put down. Though 1970's Huey remains a little shit the entire time.

I'm always worried when an author decides to use a child's POV for violent/significant parts of history. While he didn't always read like an 8 year old, the author did pull it off. The belief in the lies of the parents, but at the same time constantly questioning them because what the parents are saying doesn't quite make sense with what he's seeing. <spoiler> Every scene where his parents are straight up telling him how he's not "colored" even though it's already been revealed that his mother is black is kind of hilarious. They're almost trying to convince themselves of something while trying to convince him. It's obvious that Huey has doubts about what they're saying, but the way he accepts it and internalizes. Definitely makes you think. </spoiler> Having an innocence among the cruelty, and slowly joining in on the cruelty once things start turning for him. There was a naivete in him that I couldn't tell if it was because he was 8 or if that was part of his character. Teenage Huey had a similar naivete about him, mixed in with doses of arrogance and pseudointellectualness. While young Huey is acceptably irritating because he's a child, teenage Huey is just irritating.

I don't know if I've had a review that has a character's name written so often. I do think how much someone likes this book hinges on how they feel about Huey. Similar to Holden Caufield and [book:The Catcher in the Rye|5107], the reaction to Huey will divide readers. The side characters are as fleshed out as they need to be. I see a review above that references [book:The Sellout|22237161] by [author:Paul Beatty|44076] and I kind of see it. There are certainly elements that can be construed as satire However, the points the author makes on race hits very hard and definitely makes you think.

My only gripe is how slowly the book started. It's hard to give a recommend to a book that I almost DNF'ed from the start. The 1970's storyline, while important to the overall arc of Huey and his mother was not as interesting as the 1960's.

This is a firm 3.5/5 and I wish that Goodreads allowed partial stars because it's truly neither a 3 nor a 4. But if I must, 3.49/5 rounds to 3/5.

Malcolm Hansen’s debut novel <I>They Come in all Colors</I> is a satirical narrative worthy of Paul Beatty’s stamp of approval. By that I mean it’s obvious that this book was either inspired or nurtured in some way by the Man Booker Prize-winning Beatty, if not both, and his style is so evident here that there were times this novel could have been written by the same hand. (He is even thanked in <I>Color</I>’s acknowledgements.) For those of you who follow my reviews, you’ll recall that I couldn’t stand Beatty’s award-winning <I>The Sellout</I> and marked it DNF, but just because the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree doesn’t mean it may not taste different.

<I>They Come in all Colors</I> is the story of one boy’s realization that the color of his skin does make a difference one long summer when the Freedom Riders come to his small town and the status quo around him is thrown into upheaval. Meet Huey, the smart-mouthed eight-year-old son of a white peanut farmer and a “mulatto’’ woman. Because of his Caucasian features and his close relationship with his father, Huey has always been allowed to pass as white, but when racial tensions erupt, resulting in protests, sit-ins, riots and the violent death of someone close to his family, the facts of life are very quickly called into question between this couple who cannot legally wed in the South and their son who finds himself banned from the “white” swimming pool and called n*gger for the first time.

One of the more effective devices used within these pages is satire. In fact, really, the entire premise of the novel is satirical, but I appreciated Hansen’s wielding of it here and found it to be far more useful and self-evident than Beatty displayed in <I>The Sellout</I>. Here, that humorous device had more meaning and thus resonated louder and longer for me. Case in point, Huey encounters the most ridiculous conversations with his parents as they both try to explain to him why he isn’t colored though his mother is black. They tell him he’s white with a tan – an ironic notion in and of itself in 1960s South Georgia:

<blockquote>Huey, listen to me. Your mother’s what’s known in the scientific community as a phenotypic anomaly. Okay? Someone of unknown morphology. A racial enigma—something so new they don’t have a name for it yet. You watch Wild Kingdom, right? Well, it’s like a newly discovered animal that they haven’t figured out where to put it in the classification system yet. Okay? So it’s pointless to even bother asking. Because—well—the truth is that if people can’t agree, we might never know... At the end of the day, you’re just going to have to accept that even if she is what you think she might be—which she isn’t—her being one wouldn’t make you one. Okay? You’re just going to have to accept that you’re different. That’s all there is to it. </blockquote>

<spoiler>They also lie to him about the tragic death of their family friend and field hand, whose family has worked for the Fairchilds for three generations, when he is violently beaten to death for his part in being a leading figure in the riots when the Freedom Riders come to town. His parents both insist that he simply fell from a ladder by accident though Huey questions this rendition of events several times.</spoiler>
Though the start of this book was far too similar in tone to <I>The Sellout</I>, which means it too almost got DNFd, I pushed through a bit further and found that Hansen showed real dexterity with the metaphors and analogies that abound in this narrative. The imagery of the South is realistic and comes off nearly as oppressive within these pages as it did in real life. One of the better metaphors comes when Huey tries to set his pet cat free after the violence in his town starts to come to a head; he makes a very clear parallel, though he himself does not know or understand it, between the release from the bondage of slavery just a few short generations before and his releasing of his pet into the wild:

<blockquote> Having surrendered Snowflake to the bitter wild, I decided that I wanted her back. I knew in my heart that she wasn’t ready to be set free but I’d done it anyway. I could see that she wasn’t sure what to do with all that freedom, that it was too much for her little brain to comprehend. All that freedom being dumped on her all at once like that. I should probably have tested it out by giving her teaspoon-sized doses of freedom first. Perhaps let her run free in the den to start. What had I been thinking?</blockquote>

Then, of course, there are the lovely and impactful nuggets of truth as Huey’s self-realization of his and his family’s status in the world around them continues snowballing – as he realizes that schools are segregated and that he is the “last person in town to discover the truth” about who he is. They come faster and harder in the second half of the novel as pretenses begin to be stripped away and the threshold for denial becomes shallower and shallower:

<I>When I asked Mom who in his right mind would choose to be the descendant of a slave if given a choice, she gave me a contemptuous look.
You don’t have a choice.
Don’t be silly. Of course I do. We all have choices. Everything is a choice.
She called me, of all things, a disgrace to my race. I asked what she was referring to, precisely. Only the week before, she was peddling the idea of the whole concept of race as a sham concocted by a few eighteenth-century white men with powdered hair to more conveniently consolidate power, and now here I was, not having even had time to shit out the food I’d been eating at the time, come to find out that I was betraying it.</I>

While we’re on the topic of the second half of <I>They Come in all Colors</I>, now’s as good a time as any to say that the latter fourth or so of the novel offered too many holes in the narrative for me to forgive and inspired more questions for me than satisfying answers. <b>AND</b> while we’re on the topic of my pet peeves with this book, now’s also as good a time as any to point out the added GLARING problem that there were no quotation marks used in this novel whatsoever. Normally, this narrative tool wouldn’t be a problem, but combined with the ramblingly verbose chunks of dialogue and the use of long chapters and thick, hulking narrative blocks on every page, traditional formatting of dialogue would have been a welcome reprieve to break up the pages and make this novel seem like a faster read. By the time I got to the middle of <I>They Come in all Colors</I> I was honestly halfway exhausted from wading through the waters of prose and checking the page count to see how close I was to the end. (spoiler: To my dismay, I was nowhere close to it.)


Yet, this novel did more good for me than it did harm. It called into question not only the lies we tell ourselves to cope but the lies adults tell children and parents tell their offspring to maintain their innocence. What good is the façade if the <b>inevitable</b> realization only hits harder and is more damaging than having understood it from the start? Because then a child must also cope with the fact that not only has their existence been a lie in some shape, form, or fashion but that the adults around the are imperfect beings – who lie and cannot always be trusted to tell the truth. In Western civilization, we raise our kids with lies as a fundamental part of their upbringing – tooth fairies and Santa Clauses and excuses for the way the world is. I’ve never thought that was a productive or practical tool of parenting, and Hansen definitely manages to expose the detriment of shielding and coddling kids from what the real world holds. For that, I applauded him.


While the ending of the novel was too abrupt for me to find a ton of fulfillment in it, I did appreciate the nuggets of truth that Huey grows aware enough to impart on the reader -

<blockquote>I was being mocked and maligned on a daily basis for having the gall to use the color of my skin to gain advantage where it concerned getting into Claremont, and here people like Zuk pulled shit like that all the time and weren’t even aware of it, much less feeling pangs of guilt about it.</blockquote>

- and that his mother, Peola, finally finds the strength to impart on him after nearly a decade of insisting to him that he was white:

<blockquote>I’m going to tell you this once, sweetheart, and then I’m never going to tell it to you again. So listen well. Any person you know who has not had a family member enslaved is at a two-hundred-fifty-year advantage over you. Okay? Not the other way around. You must understand that one simple fact. You have ancestors—blood relatives, real people, connected to you by blood and history—who were enslaved, who had their families, language, labor, freedom, possessions, and identity taken from them by force and used to the advantage of everyone you see around you right here, right now. That is, everyone but us. So do not ever let anyone talk to you like you’re some goddamned drain on society. Ever! That would be like scorning the man who has built your house for not owning one himself. That’s just wrong. The only thing you oughta be worried about asking any of them is what the hell they have to show for the last two hundred fifty years of their advantage. And I don’t care if for those two hundred fifty years their ancestors were in Europe or Asia or Russia or on Mars or wherever, because I can guarantee you that they were not in chains.</blockquote>

For these dazzling moments of truth and forthrightness, I forgave many of the novel’s other sins. I recommend this novel to lovers of Paul Beatty’s work. You can think of Hansen as <I><b>Paul Beatty lite.</I></b> 😁 And I’d also recommend this novel to anyone who enjoys a cutting parody of historical events or an incisively sardonic look at the color line in America. You can always count on me to reach for a novel that offers both social commentary and satire all in the same sitting, so I’m happy to have added this book to my list of reads for this. All in all, Hansen’s debut offered bite and wit to account for what it lacked and for that I give 3.5 stars. ***

THEY COME IN ALL COLORS by Malcolm Hansen is a debut novel that features a biracial character, Huey Fairchild. The story begins in early 1960s rural Georgia when Huey is a child and the local pool is closed rather than being opened to all swimmers. He and his Mom move to New York where he is given a scholarship to a private school; the only other person of color there is the janitor. I was intrigued by the time period and premise; plus, Malcolm Hansen has some first-hand experience on which to draw since he, too, is biracial and moved quite a bit as a child. Hansen is a talented writer; for example, he memorably describes how young Huey met his Mom at a diner and "jumped into a booth beside her and squeezed her like she was the very last of the toothpaste." However, THEY COME IN ALL COLORS seemed very disjointed with the story moving back and forth between Huey (age 8) in Georgia and New York (as a teenager). Like many young people, Huey is uncomfortable with being different, but he is very naïve about it, too, and that stretches believability. I found it difficult to develop empathy for Huey and this feeling was reinforced as he frequently acts out and invites trouble for himself and his Mom.

Hansen does prompt readers to think about important points like the assumptions we make. Here, Huey describes a baseball error where one outfielder was not able to avoid another: "[I] explained to Suzie that Chacon was from Puerto Rico, which is why he wasn't able to call off Thomas in English. She asked if that was where my family was from. I'm from Georgia, I answered. I couldn't believe what came out her mouth next. Oh. So-you're American?”

Sadly, THEY COME IN ALL COLORS, like in the above passage, was made much more difficult to follow because of the absence of any quotation marks and overall I would have preferred a more linear, traditional telling.

This is a great read, and as a debut novel, Malcolm Hansen is definitely an author to keep your eye on! Although this was a hard topic to read about, it so so important, especially in this very relevant time in our history. The writing was great and even though I haven't experienced much of what the characters were dealing with, I felt a connection and was rooting for them throughout. I'm looking forward to seeing what else Hansen has to offer us!

Published by Atria Books on May 29, 2018

They Come in All Colors is a story of southern racism and its less obvious northern counterpart, told from the perspective of a boy who is biracial, not white and not black and not accepted by anyone except his parents and a few friends. Most of the story is told in flashbacks to 1962 that acquaint the reader with the racist Georgia town in which Huey was born — so racist that the motel owner is forced to drain and clean the pool because a black kid swam in it. The civil rights struggle has reached the town as black activists from other states are arriving on busses to support the fight to eat at whites-only lunch counters. The flashbacks are told from Huey’s perspective as an eight-year-old — an eight-year-old who identifies as white, like his father, who believes his light-skinned mother is white, and who has no idea that he’s the reason the swimming pool has closed.

Huey’s father is a peanut farmer. He loves Huey, he loves his wife, and he isn’t as racist as most white people in his community, he is a product of his time. He has a complicated relationship with Toby Muncie, a black man who has worked for him for years. Toby, in turn, has a complicated relationship with Huey’s mother. Huey’s father has convinced himself that his wife is “a racial enigma,” that her race cannot be identified, but that neither she nor his son are “colored.” The rest of the town disagrees.

Toby is almost a part of Huey’s family and is widely respected as a knowledgeable farmer, but Toby is a passionate supporter of the Freedom Riders, a position that does not sit well with the town’s white residents. Huey is angry at blacks who protest for equal rights, but he becomes confused when school kids start calling him a mongrel and a nappy-haired love child. His true education begins when a black kid accuses him of acting white “just because he looks like a cracker.”

In the present, Huey’s mother is a nanny for a wealthy couple in New York City. Huey has been accepted at Claremont, an exclusive prep school, because he’s the kind of minority the school likes — different but not too different. His only friend is a math prodigy named Zukowski who is attending the school for the same reason. Yet Huey has no hope of fitting in. He worries about being embarrassed by his mother, who has embraced progressive values and opposes the Vietnam War, while Claremount kids understand that war is good for business and that imperialism and a ruling class are part of the world’s natural order. Eventually, Huey creates the kind of trouble that could follow him for the rest of his life.

They Come in All Colors can be understood as a coming of age story, in the sense that Huey begins to grow into an identity of his own and to see the world through adult eyes. As a child, Huey doesn’t know why his father will only take him to the lunch counter for ice cream in the only morning, before the place fills up. He hasn’t figured out racism and doesn’t know what people mean when they tell him to go back to Africa, given that he’s never left Georgia. Huey thinks a burning cross is a celebration of religion and readily accepts his parents’ assurance that the home of the town’s only black business owner burned down because of faulty wiring.

To a lesser degree, but only because she plays a lesser role, the novel is also a coming of age story for Huey’s mother. She grows into her own identity later in life than Huey does, but it’s never too late to grow. She is the most eloquent speaker in the novel, and in some ways, she represents all the people who have been cheated by America's failure to live up to its promise of equal opportunity.

The novel raises important questions about racial identity in a time when race and identity have become a prominent part of the national conversation. According to Huey’s teacher in Georgia, the world is black and white: you’re one or the other. The lesson that Huey’s mother tries to teach him is that people come in all colors, and that race is not binary. Huey’s parents don’t try to teach him that color doesn’t matter because that lesson would be contrary to everything that Huey sees and hears, and in any event, Huey’s father doesn’t believe it. To Huey’s father, appearance determines race. The fact that Huey’s mom has tan skin, or that Huey has tightly curled hair, does not make them “colored.” That’s the only view of race that allows Huey’s father to keep his self-respect after falling in love with a black woman.

While They Come in All Colors raises important issues, it frames those issues from the perspective of a kid who is loquacious, imaginative, and funny. Huey’s inability to keep his mouth shut and his enjoyment of telling a tall tale eases the pain of reading about his experiences with racism. At the same time, by the time he reaches New York, Huey is living with a burning anger that will clearly take him years to understand. The story that the novel tells is important, but the story is captivating precisely because the reader so easily attaches to Huey as he works through his conflicts and begins to learn to be himself, even if he doesn’t fit inside the boxes that are constructed by the people he meets.

RECOMMENDED

As soon as I read the blurb on this book I was eager to get my hands on a copy. It's a coming of age story about a bi-racial boy who witnesses and experiences prejudice in his hometown in Georgia in the 1960's (although not quite understanding what he was witnessing), and later, in the 1970's, as a teen in NYC as he attends an all-white prestigious high school.

Unfortunately, I struggled on and off for two weeks to get through this book. I didn't connect with the story or the main character and found the author's method of telling the story disjointed, hard to follow and the lack of quotation marks didn't help matters. While I think the author was trying for a look at civil rights and racism through the eyes of a child (kind of like John Boyne looked at the Holocaust through the eyes of young Bruno in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas), I don't think that was achieved here. I felt it lacked emotion, connection to its characters and fluidity in the storytelling.

While others may enjoy this book more, They Come In All Colors just wasn't for me.


Disclaimer: This Advanced Reading Copy (ARC) was generously provided by the publisher in exchange for my honest review.

Exploring serious issues, such as race, from a child’s eye perspective is challenging, and trying to convey confusion from that same immature point of view is even harder. The results in this case were imperfect, the confusion passed to (this reader) rather than clarified. And by adding an element of humour, the seriousness was not intensified, but rather undermined. In total, a queasy reading experience. Disappointing.

They Come in All Colors by Malcolm Hansen is a coming of age story based in the 1960’s during the Civil Rights movement. Our main character, Huey, takes us back and forth between his 8 year old self in the small town of Akersburg, GA, and his teenage self in NYC where he attends the prestigious Claremont prep school. Huey is biracial with a white father and a black mother and the entire story is told from his perspective, as a child and then as a teen. The plot also skips between several places and times in what appears to be randomly at first, but as the book moves forward it begins to make more sense.

Reading about the Civil Rights protests in a small town in the Deep South through an 8 year old’s eyes is disconcerting at the very least. I sometimes felt like I wanted to race through these parts just so I could find out how Huey finally finds out/realizes that he’s not actually white, and how he deals with it. Seeing racial tension rise to boiling point through a kid’s eyes felt very eye opening: and the narrative is so well written that you feel like you are there with him, trapped in this mind of a kid who doesn’t really understand the absolute stupidity of adults, as well as the deeply rooted issues that are being fought against.

I love how well-rounded Huey is as a character. He’s a real teenager, he has to deal with all the issues regular teens deal with as well as living in a new city which is night and day from his home town, but also the issue of not fitting in, even in the more progressive north. He’s still the only biracial kid in his school where white supremacy is all powerful. Huey’s vision comes from what he has been taught, and what he believes to be the truth: and he has a hard time reconciling everything he has seen in his life.

I don’t want to add too many spoilers, and if I start getting into the plot I will. Let me just say that this novel is a gem. It took me a few chapters to get into it though as Huey’s narrative is very much stream of consciousness. His thoughts are all over the place, so it takes a while to get used to it. I’m so glad I didn’t let myself just be lazy and put it aside though, because They Come in All Colors is brilliant. It’s an epic view on recent history, and on today as well, but also an excellent display of how a childhood is shaped by events within the family and also current events, and how we hiding the truth to avoid pain often causes more pain down the line...

I just want everyone to read this book! They Come in All Colors will be published on May 29th, 2018 by Simon & Schuster. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance copy of this novel.

A good story with interesting characters. While I typically enjoy stories with alternate timelines, this one was a bit harder to follow. I found myself going back often to reread, make sure I was thinking about the right characters. Nothing a bit of slowing down wouldn’t help, though.