What's Mine and Yours by Naima Caster

What's Mine and Yours by Naima Caster was our book club book for the month.

First up, I was so puzzled by the "Read with Jenna" sticker on my library copy. Who is Jenna and why do I care? Apparently, this is Jenna Bush Hager and she is one of the Bush twins and is a correspondent on The Today Show where she hosts a book club.  This was her pick in March 2021. My research on this topic ended there.

In this book, we follow two families. Jade and her son Gee suffer a tragic loss. Meanwhile, Lacey May and her daughters are living parallel lives, struggling to get their bearings when the father figure of the family suffers more indirectly from the same tragedy. It's a far reaching family saga, but we do find ourselves mostly centered in North Carolina.

The book jumps from timeline to timeline and from POV to POV and I found it challenging to keep track of everybody. Because of the time jumps, I'm also left with a lot of questions about how characters went from one personality type to another since we never really got a lot of the in-between time. This was the biggest sticking point for folks in my book club - there's one character in particular who left everyone confused as to how they got from point A to point B.

But, in general, I thought this was a powerful book with a powerful message about how one event has trickle down effects for years and years.  I thought Caster's writing was beautiful, the setting was gorgeous, and her descriptions of characters were interesting and unique. Mixed bag, this one. 3/5 stars

Lines of note:

"Sometimes, people are your family because they're your blood. But that doesn't mean much on its own. The realest family are the people who stand by you." (page 67)

Recently, I keep marking lines about family. I wonder what that says about me.

...which he appreciated because he didn't believe in genius. There was only luck and social capital, as well as capital capital. (page 131)

This made me audibly snort. I do believe some people are inherently smarter than others, some people are even genius, but I do think that luck and social capital will get you more in life than any intelligence.  

Something I looked up:

Piedmont (page 1 and lots of other places) - The Piedmont is a plateau region in the eastern US. A good chunk of central North Carolina is in the Piedmont.