Wow, what a fascinating book! McBride artfully interleaves the story of his own childhood as a black boy in New York with the story of his white mother’s upbringing in Virginia. The book includes many heavy topics – abuse, racism, drugs, death – but moves so quickly from one thing to the next that I never felt weighed down when reading it. In fact, I finished the book feeling both hopeful and in awe because of the enormous success that McBride’s mother had in raising her children on hard work, faith, and love alone. The Color of Water was exactly what I was looking for – a thought-provoking book about someone interesting but relatively unknown.