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An ambitious and interesting novel, with a unique premise and a narrative voice totally unlike any other.

Eddie Asher, a startlingly handsome bi-racial man and our third-person POV narrator, was adopted as an infant by a white family, granting Eddie loving parents, and an older brother, Robert, that he quickly came to idolize. But could that also have been the start of all his problems? For not only is adult Eddie (now twenty-seven years-old) plagued by alienation, insecurity, and agonizing racial loneliness — but he suffers from mysterious black-outs, leaving huge jagged gaps in his memory that no therapist can seem to get to the bottom of.

The plot thickens when we, the reader, meet Par – a first-person narrator as mysterious as he is intriguing. Par, who presents as a sort of dissociative identity, lives within Eddie, taking over when Eddie needs him, as a sort of psychological trauma-buster – managing situations he deems to be too intense for fragile Eddie to handle.

Eddie’s world becomes even more chaotic when he meets the exotic Wynter family – artistically-gifted Black dance-studio owners, with a mixed-race fourth daughter, Lucy, that Eddie is immediately drawn to. Even if she happens to be the fiancé of his brother, Robert.

How Eddie will manage his rapidly escalating identity crisis, his tortuous and fragmented memory, his growing dependance on Lucy and her clan, and what now appears to be a black-out-driven penchant for violence, is the subject of this story – along with, perhaps even more importantly, — questions surrounding what has led to Eddie’s precarious psychological state, and what (if anything exists at all) will it take to see him made whole?

Interesting questions, handled with a well-crafted cast of characters and a few dramatic twists this reader only partially saw coming.

A great big thank you to Netgalley, the author, and the publisher for an ARC of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.