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Mislaid

Title	Mislaid
Author	Nell Zink
Publication	Fourth Estate
Size	288p
Language	ENG
ISBN	9780008100575
Topics	American fiction--Social LGBTQ--Fiction
Notes	Zink's second novel, Mislaid, her first under a major publisher, follows the story of a white lesbian, Peggy, later 'Meg', born in rural Virginia in the 1960s. Peggy leaves her marriage to her gay professor, and with the help of a stolen birth certificate, creates a new African-American identity for herself and her daughter, Mireille/Karen. Accounting for this unusual 'passing', Peggy/Meg explains: “Virginia was settled before slavery began, and it was diverse. There were tawny black people with hazel eyes. Black people with auburn hair, skin like butter and eyes of deep blue green. Blond, blue-eyed black people resembling a recent chairman of the N.A.A.C.P. The only way to tell white from colored for purposes of segregation was the one-drop rule: If one of your ancestors was black — ever in the history of the world, all the way back to Noah’s son Ham — so were you.” Though Dwight Garner called the book “a minor and misshapen novel from a potentially major voice,” Walter Kirn, in the Times Book Review, found it a "provocative masquerade with heart," identifying an "elegance and confidence that are exceptionally rare now." [wikipedia]

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