One Of Our Kind by Nicola Yoon

I’m doing this out of order and skipping books 7 and 8 for now, because I just finished this one and wanted to get my thoughts down while they’re swirling around.

Note: This post will contain spoilers for One Of Our Kind.

My knee-jerk reaction upon finishing this novel was to give it 5 stars and call it a day. For me it was fantastically successful in what it seemed to be going for. I’ve seen it referred to as a thriller, but to me it really read like a horror story, in much the same way I thought that In the Dream House was a horror story. All the plot’s beats seemed like those of a horror story: main character moves to a new place, something seems wrong but she can’t put her finger on it, repeated hints of something sinister going on, escalating uncanny dread and terror. I found it riveting and finished it in three days.

I think when I read a book as fast as I read One Of Our Kind, it can make me overlook some of its flaws, so I went looking for reviews and was surprised to see a lot of Black people on Goodreads tearing it apart. Though I disagreed with a lot of it, sometimes strongly, enough of the criticism did land with me that I would ultimately call this a four-star book.

Some of the things that were criticised, sharply at times, did seem to me like misreadings. Some people accused the ending of being anti-Black and essentially saying “it’s better to be white,” but it felt very clear to me that, this being a horror story and a tragedy, the bad guys win, and the ending needs to be read in that light. I don’t see the character in the epilogue as being content with her life. I see her as disconnected from her humanity and even from her own son.

A lot of the criticism also seemed to assume that the main character Jasmyn is a mouthpiece for the author, and we’re supposed to agree with her even as she criticizes other Black people for straightening their hair or opting out of demonstrating in response to police violence. I saw Jasmyn as sympathetic but hardly flawless, and I think she was written that way on purpose.An interview with the author confirms this was, at least, the intention.

I think a lot of people feel the pressure of the world having too many problems to be able to feel like taking time out is justified, and it’s easy for self-judgment about not doing enough to manifest as judgment of others. And I think that Jasmyn’s classically bad-horror-movie decisions at the end of the book can be seen as a consequence of her running herself ragged in the preceding months. She’s not a paragon and it seemed to me that we’re supposed to see where she’s coming from but not necessarily agree with or even like her.

For that matter, the villains in this book aren’t wholly unsympathetic, which I found to be pretty deft characterization since their actions are abhorrent. Racist circumstances have put them in what feels like a no-win situation, and they go to extremes to try to find a way out of it. The conclusions are appalling but the route to get there was not unrealistic to me. (Questions of whether the end of the book is like scientifically plausible seem completely beside the point.)

But there were some criticims that landed with me. Having Jasmyn as our POV character does make being Black in America seem like pretty much just unremitting bleakness. Part of that probably comes from the author’s acknowledgment that she wrote One Of Our Kind “from a place of despair and anger” and that comes through in both the tone and the outcome of the plot. The bleakness seems pretty consistent with the situation that Jasmyn is in, where being unable to get any traction with her fellow Liberty residents about the things that are important to her, she responds by leaning into them even harder to the point where they become all-encompassing. I think it makes sense in context, but it does mean that despite Jasmyn and her few friends occasionally talking a big game about Black joy, there’s very little of it to be found in the events of the book.

Another consequence of Jasmyn’s single-mindedness is that all the characters come off as being somewhat shallow. Jasmyn is laser-focused on social justice and the lack thereof in Liberty, and she ends up not really having a personality outside of that. And because our view on all the other characters is filtered through Jasmyn, who can’t get past how they’re failing to live up to her standards, they all seem pretty paper-thin as well. Again, I think this is a pretty natural consequence of how the story is told. But it does mean there’s not a lot of room for nuance.

“Not a lot of room for nuance” is actually a pretty good summary of this book, for better and worse. There’s no room for nuance because the book does such a potent job of conveying how the anxiety induced by living in a deeply racist society can be smothering, suffocating. Sometimes it’s overly didactic and a bit clunky about this, and it’s rarely anything resembling subtle. But I think there’s a place for books that tell a story about that anxiety, and how it can fuck people up, in an unsubtle and uncomfortable way.