B+
Genre: Contemporary Romance, Romance
Theme: Class Differences, Workplace
Archetype: Billionaire, Diverse Protagonists
His Forever Family by Sarah M. Anderson is a billionaire/boss-assistant/Cinderella/adoption story (please let that be a category on Jeopardy someday) that features a pretty substantial conversation about race, class, and privilege. All of that is packed into 256 pages, but somehow it works. Also it’s about finding your family which is a theme that almost always works for me.
Marcus Warren (billionaire and one of The Warrens) is jogging with his assistant Liberty Reese, like they do every morning, when they hear a noise and find an abandoned baby in a trash can. They do the right thing–call 911 right away. This marks a huge changing point in their relationship though.
Liberty knows what’s in store for the baby. Her mother was a drug addict and prostitute and Liberty spent time in the foster care system. Marcus doesn’t know any of this about her:
She’d created this person Marcus saw, this Liberty Reese–a white college graduate, and excellent manager of time and money who always did her research and knew the answers. Liberty Reese was invaluable to Marcus because she had made herself invaluable.
That woman had nothing in common with Liberty Reese–the grubby daughter of an African American drug addict who’d sold herself on Death Corner in Cabrini-Green to afford more drugs, who’d done multiple stints in prison, who hadn’t been able to get clean when her daughter was shipped back to foster care for the third time, who couldn’t tell Liberty who her father was or even if he was white, who’d given birth to a baby boy addicted to heroin and crack and God only knew what else.
That’s not who Liberty was anymore. She would not be that lost little girl ever again.
Right from the opening of the book, it’s clear that Marcus and Liberty are both dancing around some romantic feelings for each other. When the story starts we know that they’ve both been having pants feelings for each other for awhile, although neither has acted on it. Marcus won’t go there because his dad slept with every secretary he had and Marcus doesn’t want to be even remotely creepy or make Liberty feel like she has to date him to keep her job.
Liberty won’t go there because she feels like she can’t be honest with Marcus about her past, and she doesn’t think she’s “good for him.” Marcus comes from a prestigious family and his name is in the papers all the time. If the press found out he was dating the daughter of a heroin-addicted black prostitute, she knows they’d have a field day.
The baby, named William, forces a change in their status quo. He reminds Liberty of her infant brother who went into the system. She has no idea what happened to him, and it haunts her. When Marcus sees how much Liberty cares about William, he makes sure they can stay in touch. He uses his influence to get William sent to one of the better foster homes and arranges it so he and Liberty can visit.
It’s a huge eye-opener for Marcus that “one of the better foster homes” means a house run by a older woman with outdated amenities. He walks in and sees poverty. Liberty walks in and sees a caregiver who genuinely cares about William and who only has one baby, which means she can fully devote her attention to him. Marcus looks around thinks, “Well, this isn’t good,” while Liberty thinks that this is the best possible outcome for the baby given the system he’s in.
All of this forces Marcus to realize that he’s been living a pretty shallow life and that he needs to do what makes him happy, not what’s required of him by family, so he asks Liberty out. There could easily have been a creepiness factor to Marcus asking Liberty to date him–it’s a tough line to walk and while I love office romances, any implied or overt exploitation by a boss is the number one thing that can turn me off to the story. Marcus pursues Liberty in a gentle and careful way–he never falls into alphahole territory, and he doesn’t make demands. It also helps that he doesn’t start flirting with her until it’s been established that there is in interest on both sides and the dynamic of their relationship has already changed. It’s clear that Liberty wants Marcus, but she’s afraid of what will happen if he learns the truth about her.
As they fall in love, Liberty is more and more apprehensive that the truth about her past will unravel everything she’s worked so hard for, and that if Marcus finds out she’s passing as white, he’ll feel lied to and betrayed. It’s never implied that Marcus won’t love her because she’s black, but rather that he won’t be able to deal with the entire truth of her background (black, poor, and with criminal affiliations) because it could tarnish his golden-boy reputation. Marcus clearly feels obligated to uphold his family name, even when it’s clear that his family is using him (and they do).
As for Liberty passing as white, she addresses it outright:
“Yes, my mother was black and yes, my father was probably white. I don’t know. All I know is that passing meant I only had to work twice as hard to get out of the gutter instead of four times as hard. So yes, I passed. Yes, I let everyone think I was a middle-class white girl. I’m not about to apologize for what I had to do to survive.”
I loved this scene because Liberty doesn’t apologize for her who she is or what she did, and she refuses to be judged for it.
Since so much of the conflict is based on race and class, it would be easy for Marcus to (inadvertently) get painted as a racist or an idiot who cannot understand how the other half lives. He’s neither of those things, but he does acknowledge that he can’t possibly understand poverty in a meaningful way because to him, money is like air. It was always there and always would be and he didn’t have to think about it. He’s never experienced anything different. That acknowledgement keeps him from feeling shallow.
For Marcus’s part, he realizes that Liberty might be the only person he’s loved who doesn’t have an ulterior motive for being with him, and when he’s with her and baby William, he’s happier than he’s ever been. He starts realizing he wants both of them permanently in his life.
Marcus does not sweep in and magically adopt William, bypassing all the normal processes in place for that. There’s no skirting the system. He also doesn’t just adopt William because Liberty wants him. In fact
So if this book is so remarkable, why didn’t I give it an A? Because a lot of the plot hinged on Marcus and Liberty not talking. They had good reasons for not talking, sure, but there were plenty of opportunities for them to have an honest discussion before the moment of crisis in their story.
I really liked His Forever Family. I was engaged in the romance and in the found family theme (which I love). And I loved so much that it addressed tough subjects, stuff that can be really difficult to talk about, and did it within the context of a romance novel that was still happy and satisfying. I thought the conflict needed some work and so did the end, but overall it worked for me.
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It”s early for a one click, but there we are.
Ok this sounds good and I want to one click but I hate when novels hinge on your first spoiler. I’m going to sample now, read at lunchtime and probably buy off my kindle screen because this sounds so much like it could become a surprise jam for me.
This sounds right up my alley and my library has it in both ebook and audio! Yay!
Oooh it’s on Scribd Audio. Checking out the preview now. Billionaires and Babies, ALL THE CATNIP!!!!
1. black woman who has been in the foster system
2. … who “passes”
3. … and feels “not worthy”
4. white author
I… feel pretty cynical about this one, frankly.
I had a really, really difficult time with this book. Primarily because I didn’t think the conversation about race, privilege and class was at all substantial. It was window dressing. Just enough to give the story the patina of having racial conflict while still saying “safe” for Harlequin’s category requirements.
I’ve been mulling it for weeks, thinking about if/how to address it and having a lot of in-depth DM conversations. Here’s what I’ve come up with: I think Sarah Anderson had good intentions, but passing is something you *can’t* put a light touch on.
Because of the heroine’s complete lack of angst about passing for white and no on-page family of hers to make the split from her identity even more vivid, what we get is a message that passing is easy. More than that, we get a message that being *white* is easy, and a quick fix to growing up in the projects. Do I think Sarah intended that message? No. But that’s what happens when you don’t/can’t delve into all the toxic, complicated, racial politics that plague our country.
A Harlequin Desire may just not be the right forum. Because what could’ve been a richer story about struggle and passing and teaching a billionaire about privilege ended up being a pseudo-interracial romance where the heroine is rewarded with a rich husband for choosing whiteness.
This is precisely why I have been hesitant about picking up this book. I can imagine this story being tackled in a Harlequin Superromance, where there is a longer word count or in a single title but not in a Harlequin Desire which has always seemed to be a lighter line where the heroes maybe billionaires but there are not as many alphaholes as there are in a Harlequin Presents. Just reading the paragraph that was quoted about how Liberty had to pass as a white girl to survive gives me pause. There are plenty of people from the projects etc. who manage to make their way in the world without having to pass for white. This plot line would have made more sense to me if this book were set in 1915, not 2015.
Yeah, there was a LOT of, “Oh, no! No one can know my mom was a junkie and I came from the projects!” As if her blackness and those things were connected and she had to hide it all. Speaking of which, we’re never really given a physical description of her, except for her to note that she got “good hair” from a white grandmother (cringe, cringe, cringe!). It was if any nuance of her racial identity was stripped…meanwhile, we get the whole kit and kaboodle of the billionaire hero’s awful parents and Poor Little Rich Boy syndrome.
I found this to be a thoughtful review, but I’m there with rube and Suleikha. Passing is its own mess of complex issues, especially considering the context of the author and the genre it is written in.
I’ve also recently been having a lot of conversations about Olivia Munn being cast as psyloche (a character w/ a super fucky racist history already) and how while I really like her as an actress and want her to do well, her passing allows Hollywood to have its cake and eat it too. I feel the same about this.
I’m glad Anderson at least made the effort to address race and class issues, but it’s still worth having a conversation about. Especially since this book is set in the present. I mean, there’s a lot of that WOC do to “pass” in white society that isn’t straight up pretending to be white. Like modulating our behavior/manner of speech/avoiding certain signifiers (can’t be “too ethnic”), straightening hair, doing makeup/dressing in certain ways, and etc. All things that we learn to make ourselves more “palatable.” It’s a dance that I learned to do before I even knew what it was. (Also consider the name my parents gave me—Linda—which many have commented is the pinnacle of whiteness.)
Thx Rube and Suleikha for saving me from this purchase; there’s enough sh*t in the world to make me rage stroke. I’ll be be skipping this one.
I give Ms. Anderson credit for trying but…Nope! The heroine reads like a check list of “How to Write a Confused Half Black Heroine 101.” And for the record I say the same about a lot of street lit heroines. There are just too many complex issues piled on a single person, glossed over in a neat paragraph.
I say this in all sincerity, if mainstream readers are skittish about reading “other” heroines written by “other” authors because they fear the subject matter will be too heavy and they just want a comfort read, what is the reasoning for admiring this book? The Caucasian author?
Okay…this book, to me (opinions,etc.) is such a throwback to ‘passing for white’ in the ‘tragic mulatto’ sense that it’s a great deal uncomfortable. (And if that poor foster mom is black, really uncomfortable.)
Some of us are mixed and look plainly white (this is true of myself and a coworker of mine particularly). It causes some consternation now and again because while we’re both ‘white’ (even listed as so on our state ID’s) we don’t think of ourselves as white and have dark-skinned parents as kind of an anchor on what is sometimes a shaky grip on a non-white identity. Being white tends to mean not getting hassled but it doesn’t also mean contempt or embarrassment for our heritage. For that matter, we tend to pass because the question is never raised, not because we’re trying to bury our mixed blood under a carpet.
Rambling aside, the story is a very old one that was really popular around the early years of the past century. It’s a new century. It feels weird reading this and knowing the context is modern. I guess it’s good that she didn’t remorsefully kill herself for duping the noble white guy. :/
Wasn’t going to chime in, but now everyone else has, what they said, to the Nth degree. Also, given that we are in 2016 not 1916, why does she have to be light-skinned enough to pass for white IN ADDITION to hiding her class background? Couldn’t we have an efficient college educated PA who her employer vaguely assumes is middle class and who’s recognizably African-American? (I’d add as someone who was college adviser for first generation college students coming from poverty that “passing for middle class” is HARD, regardless of race.)
Also co-sign on the throwback to “tragic mulatto” stories of a century ago. For anyone who’s interested in a NON-tragic story about deciding to pass or not to pass in the 1920s, I can’t recommend Jessie Fauset’s “Plum Bun” enough. It was written in the mid-twenties, and it has a light-skinned heroine who learns how to stand on her own two feet, and dumps the rich blonde alphole NOT because she’s unworthy of him but because she realizes he’s an alphole, in favor of a career (gasp) AND the true hero. Also absolutely free from slut-shaming, and in fact pretty positive about women who own their own sexuality, and also are kind and supportive to each other. In some ways, the 1920s rocked.
Thank you all for the comments, they were very interesting! And thank you for the book rec, Rebecca. Will definitely try it.
I’m about half way through this and not loving it but liking it enough that I’ll finish it. I’m probably going to give it about a C+. What drew me to the story was the baby and the foster care parts. I am half of a white couple who have two bio children. We adopted my third son who is black after being his foster parents for a year (my son was six years old at the time). I’m finding the growing up in foster care, being abandoned by your drug addicted mother parts to be pretty true. The heroine’s life story mirrors my son’s life story almost exactly.
Based on my family’s experience, the heroine not having any connection to family or her black heritage rings pretty true. The heroine probably never had black foster parents. When we first met my son, his skin was a lot lighter and his hair is not super curly; most people thought he was Mexican. He even said he was Mexican if people asked. Not because he was ashamed but because that’s what he thought because there wasn’t any family to tell him differently so he just went along with what people suggested to him. We live in the San Francisco Bay Area and it is extremely diverse but the proportion of African Americans is very small. We live in a middle class area and while about 50% of my son’s school is non-white, there are only two other black kids in his whole school. I don’t think he knows what being black means or has much of a connection to his heritage.
I think that while the author may have only stumbled on a true representation of the heroine by accident, she may have hit the mark pretty well.
I just reviewed this on Goodreads and someone pointed me here to read this review. I have to admit I am on the side that really thinks the heroine as portrayed is problematic.
One of my bigger issues has already been mentioned upthread in that the heroine always seems to conflate her mother being black with her mother being an addict and a convict. These three elements of her mother’s identity are always repeated together as a group and this gives the impression that the blackness is on par with the criminal activity.
And while you can infer a lot of things, I don’t think the author gives a reason as to why Liberty feels it so necessary to pass. What happened to her related to being a black woman that made that such an undesirable state? I get that she is ashamed of her childhood, but a lot of people manage to rise above less than desirable backgrounds and make something better of themselves. What part of being black obviates that for her?
I also got impatient with Liberty’s constant hand wringing over lying to Marcus. Exactly how did she lie? Did her job application ask specifically if she were white? Did her race ever come up in conversation between them and she explicitly said she was white? How much of her childhood is she supposed to disclose to her employer? If she is light enough for people to assume she is white, it is fine that she is going about her life and has no control over other people’s assumptions about her, but unless it is her practice to casually drop the fact that she is white into conversation then her race is a non issue unless of until someone questions it. I can understand her being sick about living a lie to herself, but so much of her angst came from lying to him.
I was much too impatient with what I felt were her hard to understand motivations to enjoy anything else about this book.
Co-signed on the “tragic mulatto” stories; it’s very weird to see it so, um, straightforwardly presented in a modern book. I’d also like to mention that, as a sex worker who has known many many other sex workers, some of whom have struggled with addictions and poverty, it feels really hateful when the “junkie hooker” trope shows up. And it’s super common in romance, so my reading experience goes from “yay, luuuurve” to “ow, thanks for reminding me that the world thinks of myself and others like me, who are trying to make a living in a difficult world, as subhuman scum” really fast. That sucks, because love stories are my comfort reading, but a minefield can only ever be so comfortable, you know?