A Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler

A special thank you to Libro.fm Audiobooks, Macmillan Audio, Edelweiss, NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for an ARC/audiobook listening copy in exchange for an honest review.

The Whitman family moves into their newly built home in a tight-knit, established community. Their next door neighbours are single mother, Valerie Alston-Holt, a professor of forestry and ecology, and Xavier, her biracial gifted eighteen-year-old son. Other than sharing a property line, the families have little in common.

At first, the nouveaux-riche Whitmans appear to be a family with traditional values. Brad, the father, is a local celebrity with his charming commercials for his booming HVAC company. He also stepped up to raise Juniper, his wife's (secretly troubled) teenage daughter. But Brad's public persona is quite the opposite to his private one, and he's got secrets of his own.

Brad and Valerie become embroiled in a legal battle over the oak tree in Valerie's yard that is dying as a result of the Whitman's new build and Juniper and Xavier's romance fuels the fight between her stepfather and his mother. This cautionary tale builds to an incredible, tragic climax that negotiates its way through topics of race and race and racism, class and gentrification, sex and sexual violence, and the environment. 

This explosive novel takes place in a "good neighbourhood." Even though the tragedy that ensues has been heavily foretold, what unfolds is nothing short of remarkable. The narrative is layered and intricate with blame and consequence woven in. Fowler skewers the plot with topics of race, class, and love.

What I found most intriguing was how Fowler used the third person omniscient narrator—the neighbourhood—and occasionally breaks the fourth wall. This type of narrator brings forth some awesome truths, offers foreshadowing, and keeps the reader's interest.

My only criticisms are, that the story did take a while to get moving, and the relationship between Zay and Juniper was not fleshed out enough to be believable.

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THERESE ANNE FOWLER is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald and A Well-Behaved Woman. She holds a BA in sociology/cultural anthropology and an MFA in creative writing from North Carolina State University.

Fowler lives in North Carolina.