BookBrowse Reviews One of Our Kind by Nicola Yoon

BookBrowse:

In her adult debut, bestselling YA author Nicola Yoon envisions a Black utopia that offers a nightmarish version of freedom.

When Jasmyn Williams and her husband King move with their young son Kamau from an apartment in the diverse neighborhood of Mid City Los Angeles to Liberty, an exclusive suburb outside the city, they feel like they've made it. Not just because they're following in the footsteps of countless other upwardly mobile families who have traded in their bus passes and bustling city parks for sprawling lawns and cul-de-sacs. For these young Black parents, the opportunity to live in a designed suburb, a modern-day Black utopia, where everyone from the mayor to the police chief to the high school principal is Black, represents a kind of safety and security they never knew when they were growing up in Compton.

The chance to raise their son (and the new baby they're expecting in a few months) surrounded by Black role models, in a place where being Black is celebrated unconditionally, is especially important to King, whose brother was killed by police years earlier. But for Jasmyn, too, a public defender who never dreamed of moving out of the urban center, a first visit to Liberty is a revelation: "She imagines that growing up, surrounded on all sides by Black excellence, will plant a seed in both his and Kamau's hearts. It will help them both flourish, secure in the knowledge of their own beauty and self-worth."

But almost as soon as the Williamses move in, Jasmyn detects something a bit...off about Liberty. The neighbors are friendly enough, but they seem decidedly uninterested in getting involved with social justice movements like Black Lives Matter, or in protesting the recent police shooting of an unarmed Black man and his young daughter. Even King, who once devoted a large number of hours to volunteering at a Black mentorship program for teen boys, seems far more interested in spending time at Liberty's temple-like Wellness Center than in serving as a mentor for kids who aren't lucky enough to live in the suburb.

It takes Jasmyn a while, but she eventually finds a couple of socially engaged friends, also recent newcomers to Liberty, who are as mystified as she is by the apathy of their neighbors. But when even they start to fall under the town's spell, she starts to suspect there's something truly sinister at Liberty's center, something she needs to escape if she is to have any hope of retaining her values and identity.

Reading Nicola Yoon's adult debut, One of Our Kind, in many ways mirrors Jasmyn's experiences. Like Jasmyn, readers will feel initially uneasy, and then increasingly unsettled...and eventually real dread kicks in. This is a horror novel, but not the type that features blood and gore—instead, the horror is both more subtle and more chilling, getting under one's skin in multiple ways. Excerpts from news reports, court cases, online chatrooms, and other documents are interspersed throughout the narrative and give astute readers clues about what's really happening in Liberty.

Once readers understand the extent of the town's secrets, Yoon's novel plants serious, relevant questions about what true safety and true freedom look like, about what it means when Black pride and Black joy are subsumed by racism, fear, and repeated trauma. Although Liberty may have been founded as a Black utopia (see Beyond the Book), Jasmyn's nightmarish experience prompts consideration about what possibilities exist for envisioning a truly free Black society entirely independent of white standards or expectations, and about whether a place like Liberty effectively ignores the very real issues still plaguing Black and brown Americans unable to move there. Some readers may question Jasmyn's assumptions and definitions about what it means to be Black and to celebrate Blackness; that complexity is yet another aspect of this topical novel ripe for discussion and debate.

This review first ran in the June 19, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.