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I can't say that I enjoyed this as such, but then I'm not sure that enjoyment was intended. It was an interesting and vaguely intriguing book, and with it being so short, novella rather than novel, I had no difficulty in finishing it. I would also add that this is almost the ideal book-club book: it is chock-full of talking points, especially the ending.
I find it difficult to work out how much to say in this first post. I might try some summary points here, and then post more detail behind them in a separate post:
* The book is ambiguous, apparently deliberately so, almost all the way through.
* I thought the opening (delaying the racial aspect until well into chapter 2) was excellent.
* I don't think I ever quite "got" Clare. I wonder if that was intentional (see the first point).
* A true "chick's novel"? The interactions were familiar but not something I really understood or related to (see also the previous point).
* That Larsen was trying to say something was a little too obvious, it left the ending feeling (to me) like a bit of a cop-out.
* The title, "Passing", insists that this is a book about race, and yet without that title I would have said that race was incidental to the core of the story. Indeed, it seems to me that this contradiction was the author's intention; if so, she did very well.
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