Now For Something That Looks Different

Book Review: Your Face in Mine by Jess Row

3.5 stars

You're walking down the street of your hometown, where you have returned after a crushing personal tragedy only to have your unhappiness compounded by a depressing professional calamity, and you see a familiar-seeming man on the street.  You rack your brain, trying to think of a black man you know well enough that he would look this familiar to you, and you come up empty.  But when he gets closer, he's a high school friend who played in a band with you for a couple of years...your friend who was white (with some Jewish ancestry).  WTF?  Your friend explains to you that he's had racial reassignment surgery (a very cutting edge, secret series of operations in southeast Asia) and is now married to a black woman and living as a black man.  But he wants to go public with his story, and he wants you (conveniently now otherwise unemployed) to help him craft the narrative.

This is a crazy-promising premise for a novel, no?  And it starts out really good.  And then at some point, it just gets kind of bogged down, and then it turns weird.  Not like eerie-spooky weird, just like, wait, the characters are doing what now?  Where did that come from?  And the pay off I had been so curious about (e.g., what will your friend's wife do when she finds out?) never comes.  Instead we get a kind of implausible, meh ending.  It was hitting 2 star level by the very end.  This is too bad because the central idea was so smart and interesting.

I did not make any radical changes like that for my outfit, but I did try a personal style challenge that pushed me to do something different that's a bit outside my comfort zone.

Personal Style Challenge:  Ankle Pants with Ankle Boots -- Thursday, 11/20/14

Everybody else in the world is wearing this combination, so I thought I'd give it a try.  I had a couple of new items that came together very easily into an outfit.  It was comfortable and flattering enough.  (Yes, I wore black trouser socks under those boots.  I was not about to do the stylish "leave an inch of bare ankle poking out above your boots" thing during the 8-15 degree F days.)

And it featured a new scarf with pretty birds on it!

It's hard to go wrong with a bird scarf and a pair of bad-ass maroon boots.

White long-sleeved T (Lands End)
Black ankle pants (thrifted, Eileen Fisher)
Maroon cascade cardigan (Coldwater Creek)
*Maroon ankle boots by Dolce Vita (Nordstrom)
*Beige bird scarf (Kohls)