Skinfolk

January 9, 2023
Historian Guterl tracks the highs and lows of growing up in a sui generis household in his emotionally fraught debut. In the early 1970s, young white couple Bob and Sheryl Guterl initiated a “radical experiment”: raising two biological sons alongside four children adopted from Korea, the South Bronx, and Vietnam in a “white clapboard house with a white picket fence” in a suburban New Jersey town “so small and so quaint that it might have been a movie set,” with the hopes of creating an “idyllic, integrated, multicultural utopia” in suburban America. This proved difficult early on, with Guterl and his five siblings aware from an early age that their family looked different from others, and as the siblings matured, racialized prejudice became unavoidable. Judgments and slurs levied by those outside the family damaged its bonds, and an “incident in the basement” between two siblings sent one, a Black boy, down an all-too-familiar road: “Reform schools give way to jails and then prisons and then penitentiaries.” 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. Faith Childs, Faith Childs Literary Agency.