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Did You Hear About Kitty Karr book review

Welcome to this book review by Blackie. That's me. That was my nickname when I was a kid. It wasn't a family nickname. That was what people in the neighborhood called me because I was brown. I think I have a beautiful milk chocolate color brown. Some people didn't like it. To a lot of other people, I was way dark, and I was Blackie. Color runs deep in America. Keep reading to find out what book I'm reviewing today and what my being called Blackie has to do with it. 


Hey, y'all, it's Kyla Denanyoh, and today we are talking all about color politics, love stories, donating your money, and all of these convoluted things in one book. And I wasn't expecting it, so I absolutely loved the book. Today, we're discussing the book Did You Hear About Kitty Karr? The author of the book is Crystal Smith Paul. The genre of the book is fiction. The theme of the book is suspense historical literature. 


I was not expecting this book to be about race, politics, and color and passing. Passing is what you would call an African-American person, sometimes even a Creole person whose features are very pale. Their skin does not have as much melanin as my skin would have. Their hair is very fine. Their nose may not be as wide. They have all of these caucasian features that would make them pass for being white. There's no better way to describe that. 



Kitty Karr had to learn how to even act like a white woman. Not in terms of Oh, I have a high-pitched voice, and I'm authentic but I like how to be entitled, how to go into a store and expect people to wait on me, right? Because she grew up with her mother, who was a black-facing person. Some people are African-American, some people are Creole which is French and Cajun mixed together, who you would not think were black, right, and we have all these terms quadroon all the mulatto all of these terms for the people that have this really fair skin. But this book is about that, and I did not know it. 



I'm telling you this not to deter you from reading the book, but because I thought it was about a book like old Hollywood I saw on the cover. It's giving the seven husbands of Evelyn Hugo, so I was like, let's see what's going on here. Well, Kitty Karr is an actress. A famous white woman who makes it. She earns an Academy Award. She is on the grandest stage. She falls in love. She wants to have children, but she knows that she can't. Why can't she? Because your genes make up your genetic code, which makes up your person. 



Kitty Karr knows what she grew up around. She grew up around her mom, taking her to North Carolina, big cities, and the movies, and her mom acted like she was the nanny, right? The brown skin people and the slaves, well, they were skinned, but the slaves would be the people who would raise the kids. They'd be the ones that would feed the kid a lot of times. They would be the ones that would even nurse the children because, you know, the plantation owners didn't want to ruin their bodies by doing all that stuff. 


So she was raised to be hiding to be like, oh, I'm with my mom, but I can't call her my mom because I have to call her the nanny. After all, we wouldn't have all these things if they thought that I was black. She grew up with the two lives. This is truly a tale of two lives because she grew up with all of the neuroses and insecurities of being a black female. Still, she had to learn how to present as a white woman and to have whatever arrogance or entitlement she would have. And I say I would have because I'm a lawyer. I didn't say it; Crystal Smith Paul said it. 


She had to learn how to walk into a room in the 1940s and command respect because she grew up watching her mother, and her mother didn't do that. Her mother could not teach her how to do that. 



One of my absolute favorite things about this book is that love is not unconditional, and this book explains that perfectly okay. People call things a coming-of-age story, and this had multiple layers of being a coming-of-age story, and I absolutely thought it was fascinating. 


Until the next book review, Kyla

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