Thanks to BookishFirsts and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the ARC in exchange for my honest review!
"Members Only" by Sameer Panya follows Raj as his life falls apart. Starting with one seemingly harmless (to him) joke and ending with everyone turning against him for comments he has made as a college professor. This book was an interesting fictional look on race, what we say, and how we say it.
I loved this interesting perspective of someone who has experienced the feeling of "other-ness" being pegged as the one treating others as different. While in one case I think his comments were wrong, I think in his professor role he wasn't doing anything wrong. It's interesting to me the difference between people who play the victim and people who are willing to have discussions and learn and grow.
I also enjoyed learning about a new perspective: those who have different national origins, but have spent most of their life in the U.S. It seems people who grow up like this face some prejudices that don't apply or fit to them at all simply because of their skin tone. I've never experienced anything like that, so this book expanded my worldview a little. I always appreciate a good worldview expansion (my college professors would be proud of my use of worldview, ha.).
Overall, I felt like this book had fairly good writing and a topic I could engage with and think about beyond just a nice fictional story. The tones of real life make this book a valuable read. For this, I gave it 4 stars.
"Members Only" by Sameer Panya follows Raj as his life falls apart. Starting with one seemingly harmless (to him) joke and ending with everyone turning against him for comments he has made as a college professor. This book was an interesting fictional look on race, what we say, and how we say it.
I loved this interesting perspective of someone who has experienced the feeling of "other-ness" being pegged as the one treating others as different. While in one case I think his comments were wrong, I think in his professor role he wasn't doing anything wrong. It's interesting to me the difference between people who play the victim and people who are willing to have discussions and learn and grow.
I also enjoyed learning about a new perspective: those who have different national origins, but have spent most of their life in the U.S. It seems people who grow up like this face some prejudices that don't apply or fit to them at all simply because of their skin tone. I've never experienced anything like that, so this book expanded my worldview a little. I always appreciate a good worldview expansion (my college professors would be proud of my use of worldview, ha.).
Overall, I felt like this book had fairly good writing and a topic I could engage with and think about beyond just a nice fictional story. The tones of real life make this book a valuable read. For this, I gave it 4 stars.