Review
"Transracial adoption will never empower adoptees of color or our white family members to sidestep the realities of privilege, bias, and racism; as Skinfolk shows, we will meet and experience these things in the most intimate of ways, within the microcosm of our own family. Reading Anna’s challenge to her brother, one that may have been decades in the making, I knew where all my natural sympathy as an adoptee lay. My response to Guterl’s description of his agonizing confusion and self-doubt, which kept him awake for hours that night, took me by surprise. It made me catch my breath and wish that I could see or speak to my adoptive parents, both of whom are now gone, and simply feel close to them again. I know what it is to confront a painful and unwanted distance between you and those you love; to want to believe, if only for a moment, that your will alone can bridge it."
― Nicole Chung, The Atlantic
"Ambitious, intellectually searching... Guterl doesn’t spare himself when describing the inescapability of racial harm.... [His] strengths as a writer show in his unflinching analysis of this and other racially complicated scenes."
― Chloé Cooper Jones, New York Times Book Review
"Quietly searing."
― Casey Schwartz, New York Times
"[Guterl] writes poignantly about his upbringing, particularly as the family and his siblings battled xenophobia and racism."
― New York Times Book Review, “14 Books Coming in March”
"Guterl, professor of Africana studies and American studies at Brown University and author of Seeing Race in America, fashions a moving, elegant memoir of his childhood within the 'idealized experiment' of multiracialism . . . An earnestly felt, beautifully wrought story of an American family in all its complexity."
― Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"With precision and unwavering care, Guterl explores the ethics involved in his parents’ endeavor and confronts the consequences of even the best intentions. The result is an eye-opening, instructional, and necessary take on race in America."
― Publishers Weekly
"Guterl focuses much of the story on himself and his closest siblings, Bear and Bug, and on the realities of growing up in a big family. But he is clear-eyed about his privilege, even within his family, and about his parents who, with the best of intentions, have the whiff of white saviors."
― Kathy Sexton, Booklist
"It's fabulous! Beautifully written, insightful, sad, funny, brave and tender . . . everything one wants."
― Adele Logan Alexander, historian and author of Ambiguous Lives: Free Women of Color in Rural Georgia, 1789–1879
From the Back Cover
“Matthew Pratt Guterl’s Skinfolk explores a question we all face: What makes us kin? This fascinating story of his family’s utopian experiment teaches us that it takes more than blood to bind us together. Guterl walks along fraught lines of race, language, color, and history with compassion and grace. In some moments gripping and at others intimately at ease, Skinfolk opens a door to our dreams of what the idea of family might make possible.”
―Martha S. Jones, author of Vanguard
“An achingly moving memoir. . . . Matthew Pratt Guterl lays his scholar’s eye over a complex narrative exploring the joys and limitations of love, family, and adoption.”
―Marie Myung-Ok Lee, author of The Evening Hero
“Skinfolk lays bare one family’s dramatic attempt to create a kind of racial reckoning by offering up their own household as a model for integration and diversity. With unflinching eyes, Matthew Pratt Guterl examines his family experiment with an academic’s precision, detailing the moments of transcendence, awkwardness, and longing. A fascinating read.”
―Julia Scheeres, author of Jesus Land
“Matthew Pratt Guterl chronicles the struggle to build a family in the aftermath of war and social strife with grace and vulnerability. . . . The story of this family is unforgettable in its embrace of the personal and the political. The notion of belonging is drawn and redrawn across these pages with honesty and abiding affection. A powerful read.”
―Wendy S. Walters, author of Multiply/Divide
“I’ve long admired Matthew Pratt Guterl’s histories of race and racism in America, and in this moving, beautifully written memoir, he shows us how those same histories shape our most intimate attachments.”
―Natalia Molina, author of A Place at the Nayarit
About the Author
Matthew Pratt Guterl is professor of Africana Studies and American Studies at Brown University. He is the award-winning author of four books, including Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
