What We Lose

What We Lose

What We Lose tells the tale of a young, mixed woman named Thandi and the grief she experiences upon the death of her mother. Thandi grows up in Philadelphia, raised by her South African mother and black US American father in material comfort. Though Thandi ruminates upon race early on in the novel—how she experiences race in New England versus Cape Town, how she experiences race as a mixed person—this aspect of the novel largely falls off after Thandi’s mother dies. Becoming depressed, Thandi acts in a dreamlike state as she falls in love with a white man named Peter and marries him after the two become pregnant, though the couple separate just as quickly upon realizing their incompatibility as housemates and co-parents. The novel, with its consistently dreamy and distant tone, doesn’t clearly demarcate the transition between Thandi’s actions and state of mind before and after the death of her mother, leveling and taking the punch out of the entire book as the reader struggles to determine whether Thandi’s actions are motivated by her depression or are meant to indicate an otherwise-derived ambivalence about life. While engrossing and readable, this book left me ultimately unsatisfied. Subjects this book includes that some readers may be sensitive to (but which others may be thrilled to find sensitively discussed in their literature): racism, death, cancer, attempted sexual assault.

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