Ugh. This is the second book I’ve read in a row now where the characters are terrible people who are impossible to root for. The first was Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke, and now it’s Entitlement, by Rumaan Alam.
In Entitlement, we have aged billionaire Asher Jaffe, who creates a foundation to “give away” his fortune before he dies. Unsurprisingly, Jaffe turns out not to be a good person. He spends nearly a million dollars on a birthday present for his wife, but thinks $10k is enough for arts in schools. His altruism isn’t actually and is instead some elaborate tax scheme. And he wonders what black skin would feel like against his own decrepit wrinkles (it feels like skin, you old bigot).
And then there is Brooke. Brooke is in her early 30s and has the black skin Asher wonders about. Brooke was adopted by a single white mother and has an adopted brother, also white. She is Vassar-educated, and, by all accounts, beautiful. And she is also terrible. She is stupidly jealous of a friend who received a large inheritance from her dead father. She sees her fellow Black people (yes, basically all of them) as nothing more than the means to an end. And she uses her job at the Asher and Carol Jaffe Foundation trying to scheme her way into the monied lifestyle she feels entitled to.
All told, this one was just not for me. In addition to the mostly hateful characters, the writing just wasn’t my cup of tea. I feel that Alam’s style of writing (mostly) worked in Leave the World Behind because it added to the sense of mystery and unease. In Entitlement, he writes, presumably with a straight face, that “The grass was hysterical with dew” and, Sir, no. Absolutely not. It’s not that the author doesn’t have interesting things to say with this book, he definitely does! It just sometimes gets lost because he also writes about hysterical grass. I also didn’t love the choice of this male author, who is not Black, to make the lead character a Black woman. I understand that he’s adopted Black children, and maybe he has Black friends, but I found it uncomfortable to read.
Final Verdict: 2 stars and no more Rumaan Alam for me, I don’t think.
CBR18 Bingo Circle: “Wealth” because Jaffe has it and Brooke can’t think about anything else.
