WHITE

Driven to somehow expunge the stain of her racist upbringing, a young woman from a white supremacist family dedicates her entire life to becoming the ultimate double agent.

It’s not surprising that the Nazi-loving male figures in Rubin’s “near historical fiction novel” (set in the years prior to the Oklahoma City bombing) are terrible husbands, fathers, brothers, and uncles. Sarah Cartell, the earnest protagonist in the eye of this storm of would-be stormtroopers, already understands this by the time she’s 8 years old and is sentenced along with her siblings to do penance on the rocky shores of “kneeling beach.” The kids’ crime? “Mixing” with a boy new to Goderich, Ontario, named Curtis Otonga, the son of a Nigerian doctor now working as a janitor at the local grade school. Sarah’s trespasses continue when, at 14, she and Curtis secretly become an item and she lands a job assisting the neighborhood librarian, Mrs. Broder. The librarian takes young Sara under her wing and reveals the awful truth about the girl’s Holocaust-denying “Grandpa” Thomas Cartell. Determined to not only escape the Cartell clan but also to thwart it, Sarah heads off to McGill University in Montreal on a mission to bring the white supremacists down before they and their clandestine network of skinheads and Nazi sympathizers can cause more harm. She does her best to break through the walls she’s erected around herself and manages to form close friendships with the very kind of people the Cartells abhor. But the increasing stress of being both a progressive university student and an undercover faux Nazi ultimately becomes too much for Sarah to manage, and she finds herself committed to the Sunnyside Mental Health Centre under the care of Mona Rubinoff, who helps Sarah deal with the painful familial complexities inherent in being one of the Cartell clan’s unhappy progeny.

Rubin excels at keeping the humanity tied up in Sarah’s thorny situation front and center. Although committed to confronting the Cartell’s ignorant brand of evil head on, Sarah cannot simply eliminate the familial bonds that she shares with them—no matter how much she loathes their tainted worldview. Sarah can’t even reconcile the animal attraction she feels for her boyfriend Marc and her absolute revulsion regarding every sickening racist thing he advocates. The increasing angst and turmoil roiling inside Sarah’s slight 104-pound frame is rendered with startling realness, only increasing as the young woman further pursues her life’s mission. The author achieves this level of authenticity through the use of lean prose and stark dialogue, which often crackles with the energy of exchanges in a John Cassavetes movie. Readers are practically airdropped into Goderich, Ontario, to meet young Sarah Cartell in summer of 1982 and continue on with her all the way to the Sunnyside Mental Health Centre in the mid-1990s; the “in the moment” feeling Rubin achieves is even more impressive when considering that the dark back story of the Cartell men (and two women who managed to escape their hateful existence) runs concurrently throughout Sarah’s intense journey.

A provocative exploration of the ties that bind and the mad hatred that kills.