Loving Day by Mat Johnson - SDS Selection for June 2015

For the past few years Sisters of the Desert Sun, family and friends have gathered to celebrate Loving Day.  It is a moment for those of us with blended families to celebrate the Supreme Court case Loving vs. the State of Virginia in which an interracial couple after being arrested and exiled sought to have the miscegenation laws across the country overturned.  This year our celebration will include discussing the brilliant Mat Johnson's work "Loving Day".  As you turn the pages another of Johnson's profound novel's take a moment to visit the  national Loving Day website at www.lovingday.org for information about the historical court case and celebrations that take place every year around the country.

From the Publisher

“In the ghetto there is a mansion, and it is my father’s house.”
 

Warren Duffy has returned to America for all the worst reasons: His marriage to a beautiful Welsh woman has come apart; his comics shop in Cardiff has failed; and his Irish American father has died, bequeathing to Warren his last possession, a roofless, half-renovated mansion in the heart of black Philadelphia. On his first night in his new home, Warren spies two figures outside in the grass. When he screws up the nerve to confront them, they disappear. The next day he encounters ghosts of a different kind: In the face of a teenage girl he meets at a comics convention he sees the mingled features of his white father and his black mother, both now dead. The girl is his daughter, and she’s been raised to think she’s white.

 

Spinning from these revelations, Warren sets off to remake his life with a reluctant daughter he’s never known, in a haunted house with a history he knows too well. In their search for a new life, he and Tal struggle with ghosts, fall in with a utopian mixed-race cult, and ignite a riot on Loving Day, the unsung holiday for interracial lovers.

 

A frequently hilarious, surprisingly moving story about blacks and whites, fathers and daughters, the living and the dead, Loving Day celebrates the wonders of binaries bound in love.