That Kind of Mother

It's 1985, and like many first-time mothers, Rebecca Stone finds herself equally overwhelmed and overjoyed by her newborn son.

Her husband is willing to abdicate child-rearing to her as he focuses on his career as a diplomat, so Rebecca is left on her own to juggle the demands of motherhood with her aspirations to be a poet. She aims to follow the example of Princess Diana?a personal idol, the living embodiment of grace and good humor.

But it's not the princess who changes Rebecca's life; it's Priscilla Johnson, who comes to work as the family nanny. Priscilla brings order to the household even as her presence shakes up Rebecca's perception of the world. As race once again becomes a flashpoint in American society, so too it becomes a deeply personal matter inside Rebecca's cloistered and comfortable life?an opportunity to confront, for the first time, the blind spots in her own privilege.

Rebecca feels so profoundly connected to the woman who has taught her what it means to be a mother that when Priscilla dies unexpectedly in childbirth, it seems strangely natural for Rebecca to step forward to adopt the baby. But she is unprepared for what it means to be a white mother with a black son. As she soon learns, navigating motherhood will be a matter of learning how to raise two children whom she loves with equal ferocity, but whom the world is determined to treat differently.

With the same warmth and psychological acuity that defined his debut, Rumaan Alam has crafted a remarkable novel about the families we fight to build and those we fight to keep.