“I’d rip the world apart to keep her safe.”

A heart-wrenchingly raw and beautiful generational novel about women, family, and race, Carr writes with nuance and depth creating a story that I will think about long after the final page has been read. Moving between the past and the present, Carr adeptly covers the topics of race, discrimination, violence, identity, grief, family, unplanned pregnancy, and parenthood as we see first hand what Evelyn, Kareela, and Violet have overcome and the ripple effects of the tragedies they’ve faced. Each of these three women are paragons of strength and resilience as they struggle to survive to live another day.

“We Rip the World Apart” is necessary and oh-so-important. It is meant to be savoured, absorbed, pondered, and shared.

I alternated between the ebook and audiobook. Narrator Tebby Fisher brought the characters to life giving each character a distinctive voice including a Jamaican accent which I loved. I have to confess I mainly listened to the audio, only occasionally switching to the ebook because I found Tebby’s narration so compelling.

Thank you @bookmarked for the ebook and @rbmedia.groupvc for the audiobook which I read on @netgalley The ebook contains a reading guide and bibliography for further reading, which I really liked.

This was an interesting story on race, identity, grief, and trauma.
The book takes place in Jamaica and Canada and transitions between the present and the past in a way that’s seamless and engaging!
I wish that there was a little bit more character development for Kareela. I feel like she was getting there towards the end but I found myself wanting more.
Overall, I think the book is a heartbreaking reflection on racism and the dangers of standing up for what’s right.

A heart wrenching look at racial injustice through the lives of 3 generations of women. The story is seamlessly woven through dual timelines an multiple POV's. Friends, please read this book.

What a book! What a journey! What an adventure.

This was my first book by the author, and I can confidently say I’m eager to read her other works.

One thing about this book: it WILL move you. It will make you question things. It will immerse you in its world and you will feel their longings, pain, and hopelessness.

This book stirred so many emotions and challenged my preconceptions so deeply. I had to pace my reading to reflect on the story being told and draw parallels to real life—about people who are hurt and, as a result, inadvertently, end up hurting others. About how much these wounds and traumatic events shape who we become and the choices we make.

I loved that the book emphasizes that we don’t have to be defined by what happens to us. That understanding is not easy to come by and/or achieve this sense of freedom. Especially when the characters mostly wanted to find a place to... belong.

I was moved to tears several times. The depth of each character is incredible. You love them in one chapter, question their decisions in the next, and detest them in another—only to later understand the true reasons behind their choices. The book masterfully reveals the motivations that drive their actions.

What struck me the most in the beginning was the hopelessness in Kareela’s perspective, which reminded me of a Brazilian song called “Como Nossos Pais” by Elis Regina. The lyric says, “My pain is realizing that despite all we’ve done, we’re still the same and live just like our parents”, especially when she questions herself about the lack of change in societal views of the Black community: "Will it ever?"

Thank you to RBmedia and NetGalley for the ARC.

I love this. I love the narration and the story. It is a heavy book but I like the bonds between people. I learned a lot too.

An extremely moving and at times heartbreaking, intergenerational family story told from the POV of three Caribbean-Canadian women, their complicated relationships and the way their lives are differently affected by motherhood, loss, immigration, racism (institutional, covert and overt), grief and trauma.

Perfect for book club discussions and extremely relevant to Black lives in America AND Canada today. This is good on audio too narrated by Tebby Fisher and highly recommended for fans of books like The skin we're in by Desmond Cole. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an early digital copy in exchange for my honest review!

CW: abortion discussion/consideration, rape, loss of a child from gun violence

“Words are great. But action, systemic change, is what’s needed.”

When my son was nine months old - three months after the killing of George Floyd - an officer in my city shot a Black man in the back seven times in front of his children. It sparked several nights of protests, and the murder of two innocent people. Buildings burned down, an entire strip of a city block. And it was all we could talk about. Our city made national news. There were helicopters at all times. You couldn’t see the sky through the smoke from the burning buildings. It felt like the apocalypse had come to our small corner.

And I remember panicking. I always knew life would look different as a mom to biracial children. I knew I had to listen. To unlearn and relearn. To prep myself for The Talk with my boys well before parents prepare for the other kind of talk with their teens. I felt fear and outrage. A friend of mine said something to me that changed my entire trajectory: “Being the wife of a Black man and a mom of Black kids is not enough.”

It isn’t. It isn’t enough. And so I kept unlearning and relearning. That means reading and educating myself, learning about hair care, heritage, history, systemic racism and how it trickles into every facet of life.

I saw myself in this book if I hadn’t taken my friend’s words to heart and instead chose to be offended by them. But I realized quickly that this isn’t about me. This isn’t about my feelings. And I’m glad for her, glad for her words, because I cannot imagine feeling the loss of self that our main character was feeling because her mother let her fear force her to bury her head in the sand.

This book shattered me. I had to step away several times to just collect myself. It hurt. It was the reality of every day life as a Black person. It is a point of view that we as white people need to be quiet and listen to. Because surprisingly, Black people can share their story and white people will still dispute it. This book needs to be required reading. It has left me hollow, cold, empty, despairing. Hopeful, educated, informed, uplifted. It was beautiful in all its pain and harsh reality.

I thought I was going to enjoy this book way more than I did. The narrator made it very uninteresting from the very beginning. I find the author was constantly retelling the same story over and over again even with the dual POV which made the book a lot longer than it needed to be. I understand grief is like that in real life, but it was extremely drawn out as a reader. Over the course of the book the author did do a great job at speaking to how grief related to all of the characters identity.
Pub Date: 1/28/2025
Thank you RBmedia and NetGalley for this digital ARC

I really wanted to enjoy this book and couldn't get past the monotone of the narrator. I also felt that this book was longer than it should have been. I did enjoy the mixing of the two timelines and how they were perceived in each time. To me, it was a struggle to get through the book. This is the type of stories where one has to connect with the characters and unfortunately I never did.

Carr is officially an auto-read author for me. Her books are timely and important commentary on race and womanhood. Told through the perspectives of 3 generations of women, this book hooked me right from the start. The intergenerational trauma and healing is poignant, and the depiction of the biracial experience is powerful. I loved the layers and complexities to this one, and the way it all came together. Highly recommend on audio-- narration was stellar.

The narrator Was really good and it made the story better. This was a heavy multigenerational novel with many heavy subjects. It wasn’t an interesting topic for me but the author handled the subject very well.

I waited over a year for this book, which was published in Canada last year but is just releasing in the US this week. I want to thank @Netgalley for the ARC audiobook.

This is an intense book, full of emotion.. It is the story of Kareela Jackson, a 24 year old biracial Canadian woman, who, as the book opens, discovers she is pregnant from her white boyfriend. But the book is so much more than this. It is the story of her white mother, Evelyn, who lived with her Jamaican husband, in Kingston, until the violence sent them to Evelyn's home in Canada, fearing particularly for their son's safety. It is the story of Violet, Evelyn's mother-in-law, who suffered the loss of two children to violence in Jamaica. And most of all, it is the story of Antony, Kareela's teen-aged brother, who despite his parents move to Canada to keep him safe, was killed by the police when Kareela was just a small child, plunging her parents into unimaginable grief, making them unable to properly parent Kareela. But Kareela was lucky - her grandmother Violet came from Jamaica to care for her, saving her from total neglect and affording her the chance to learn about her Jamaican roots.

As the book progresses, many family secrets are laid bare, and Kareela is able to understand her mother somewhat better. As Kareela becomes more involved with the Black Lives Matter movement, she begins to find an identity that was stripped from her, as her mother had tried to erase her Blackness in fear of Kareela becoming another statistic.

This is a tough read that deals with race, police brutality, parenting and interracial relationships. But I am so glad that I read this moving book. The characters are so vivid and the back and forth of Kareela's and Evelyn's stories allows the reader to understand the family's history.. This is a great book for book clubs, offering a lot of discussion topics.

#netgalley

This book was hauntingly beautiful. I love how it followed 3 different women from the same family and their trials and their heartbreaks but also their wins and their self discovery journey.

This is an unsettling book about the way Black and Brown people are treated, not only in the US, but in Canada. The story revolves around a mixed race family in Canada. The husband has a PhD and is a college professor. His wife is originally from Canada, but moved to Jamaica, where the couple met. They have two children, years apart in age.

The story moves through time jumps, back in time and then forward again. The timeframe is clear from the chapter titles and from the stages of the couple and their children.

Antony is angered and motivated by racial injustice. He sees himself as a "zebra" neither white, nor black. He is at odds with his parents, particularly his father. The timeline moves from a young couple meeting and falling in love, through the joy of marriage and a new baby and continues through tragedy and the family coming apart at the seams.

It isn't an easy story to read, but it's an important book about love, racial strife, and the destruction of a family. I have both the e-book and the audio book. The narrator is excellent.

We Rip the World Apart
By Charlene Carr

5/5
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Audiobook

Thank you to @netgalley for facilitating early access to this beautiful story.
Starting off in 2021 as the Black Lives Matter movement takes hold, multigenerational story will leave your heart in pieces.
@charlenecarrauthor doesn’t hold back in addressing racism, family, loss, grief, and other controversial topics. A journey through life, love, tragedy and a search for self.
The narration of the audiobook is beautifully done.
My heart has been touched and this amazing story is one that will stay with me.

Release date: January 28, 2025

#netgalley #weriptheworldapart #newrelease #jan2025 #bookreview #bookrecommendations #bookstagram #books #bookaddict #booklover #audiobook #goodreads #readmorebooks #bookworm

Thank you to NetGalley and RBMedia for the audiobook in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own.

I would give this a 3.5! Maybe 3.25.

We’ll start with what I didn’t like:

I have complicated feelings about this book. And I wanna acknowledge that it can be hard for me, a white woman, to fully grasp to depth and complexity of the emotions/issues presented here through my lens of white privilege. I want to be clear that my critiques are for the craft of the writing and not the content.

I think that the examination of police brutality, the senseless killing of black men and boys and it’s a generational effect is an important one to be examined through both fiction and non-fiction. First and foremost I want to be clear that the topics in this book are uncomfortable, and meant to be, and very worthy of discussing and I agree fully with the overall sentiment.

I knew going into this that I have in general had a lot hard time with multigenerational saga stories. This is absolutely just reader error/preference. They tend to be slower and more introspective, which was true in this case. I think my largest problems have to do with the pacing of the story, and as a personal preference, I don’t tend to enjoy as much introspection as was done by the characters in this book.

We spent a lot of time in two of the main character thoughts rather than having the plot of the novel come forward at a more regular pace. For about the first 80% of the story, we were kind of dealing with veiled truths and very slow pacing. Then in the last 20%, there is a significant trauma revealed and the resolution comes very quickly after that. I’m not saying I need half of a book to deal with a large reveal, but in this case it was offset by how slow the first 80% of the book had been. So that’s a me thing. Pacing and introspection = not for me.

Of the characterization, I really enjoyed the father, brother, and grandmother (in fact more of the GMA would have been awesome). However, the main character felt the least developed to me, which may be the point as she is working through immense trauma. But by the end I found her to be, I don’t know? Very very short sighted? In a way that I know was supposed to be a part of her arc but again that didn’t really come through for me. It just didn’t work for me.

My only other complaint is that due to the introspection, much of this book read like a non fiction think piece in the Atlantic rather than a fictional account of police violence. A lot of statements we see from Black Lives Matter protestors were thrown around left and right like copy and paste bullet points rather than the author providing us with newer takes. As I said, these topics are so important, all those sentiments are true, and we should be talking about this constantly. but it felt like I was listening to a flyer or a protest speech, not a novel.

Okay complaints aside let’s talk about what I liked:

This book was not afraid to tackle complex issues in a way that I think it would be accessible for broader readers. I think that for people who are not as familiar with the Black Lives Matter movement in general, this will be a great entryway into empathy and understanding.

I think the political weaving of Jamaica in contrast with Canada was new and fresh. It made me think about these topics from a different POV than I really have before (said the white woman I know).

I also think that while the mother character could have been more…I don’t know the word I’m looking for but something just felt slightly off about her, she was still a very nuanced character and I like that she was allowed to be both bad and good in a way I appreciated.

The heart in this book is immense. The care and nuance and space the characters hold for each other is so inspiring. Looking police brutality in the face is what we need from more authors of all genres.

WOW, WOW, WOW! That ending! (well, the 80-90% part)
Easy 5 stars
I've not read something this powerful in a long time.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an early opportunity to read and review. I have to admit, I went in mostly blind, and as it started, I thought, "this is dragging"... but fairly quickly after that, I was hooked!

It spans quite a few years as we watch kids grow. A White mother, a Black father, and their young son -- a son who, as he grew, recognized that his "blackness" will get him hurt someday -- He didn't know how, but he just knew/felt it would. Canada was a different place in the 80's when the Jamaican Exodus occurred, where Black men were viewed with suspicion. The couple has an "oops" baby, and that's where things get interesting.

Trauma hits all around them. We follow the daughter's life (the novel takes place in her young adulthood) and then flash back to her mother's life. The father's Jamaican mother also comes to live with them and plays a pivotal role for all of them.

We visit the beginnings of the BLM movement and then Covid... important conversations all around. But the author crafted these characters so deeply, that I felt validation and vindication for one and anger for another. And then, BAM! My feelings got turned upside down and around.

This book delivered stunning prose and relevance and opens the door to further conversations. I'm honestly shocked that we aren't hearing about this book more! Publishes January 28th - highly recommend.

Thank to NetGalley for an ALC. This book was really heart-wrenching and raw. I found the characters likable and the plot believable. It was sad and upsetting, and I think it needed to be to get its point across. This kind of stuff needs to stop happening.

We Rip the World Apart will rip your heart apart. This poignant, powerful, and thought provoking story is told across three generations of women. It tackles a multitude of difficult and important issues such as racism, interracial relationships, biracial identity, sexism, violence against women, trauma, the impact of multigenerational trauma, cultural differences, the search to understand one’s authentic self, and so much more. The writing is beautiful, and the author masterfully delves into the inner worlds of each character highlighting their personal turmoil when faced with impossible decisions.

This is a novel that I will not soon forget. Everyone should read this book! Thank you to NetGalley, RBmedia, and Charlene Carr for this free audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

Kareela, pregnant and unsure if she wants the baby, is struggling to find her place in the world as a biracial woman following the death of her brother in a police shooting.

Moving between the past and the present, Charlene Carr tells a beautiful and heartbreaking story about the impact of generational trauma and the struggles of being of two different races. While Kareela tries to figure out where she belongs, she is in a constant struggle (not black enough to be Black, not white enough to be white).

As the mom of a biracial son also of Jamaican heritage, at times this book was especially hard to read, particularly as it dealt with her brother’s death at the hands of the police. The impact of his death on their mom Evelyn broke my heart into a million pieces more than once. There is a whole lot of emotion tucked into these 400 pages and a family you can’t help but feel connected to both in the past and the present.

🎧 Narrator Tebby Fisher breathed life into this story, giving voice to each character in a wholly distinct way. This would make for an incredible immersive read (and book club read).

Read if you like:
▪️intergenerational stories
▪️complex mother/daughter relationships
▪️exploration of racial identity and racism
▪️dual timelines/POV

Thank you Sourcebooks Landmark, Recorded Books, and Charlene Carr for the gifted copies.