MY NAME IS IRIS

A Latine mom struggles to maintain her perch in a society determined to undermine her.

The title of Skyhorse’s second novel is a lie: The real name of the narrator, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, is Inés. But ever since a schoolteacher struggled to pronounce that correctly, she’s been Iris, which is just one in a series of microaggressions she’s spent a lifetime shrugging off. She’s led a life that in the early chapters appears to have the makings of a standard-issue novel of American family dysfunction: She’s middle-class, newly separated, and raising a 9-year-old daughter, Mel, in a new home in suburbia. But curious signs around town start promoting a “band” that people are asked to wear on their wrists; one day a stone wall appears in her front yard, which only she and Mel can see. From there, Skyhorse spins an extended allegory not just around just how much White America is eager to disenfranchise immigrants—the bands are ID badges available only to people with at least one U.S.–born parent; the wall speaks for itself—but how immigrants often live in denial about the contempt they face. Skyhorse can be didactic on these points: Iris’ sister, Serena, appears in the story mainly to deliver tough-love lectures about her cultural blindness (“I didn’t major in whiteness in college como tú”). But the eeriness of the mysterious wall and ever intensifying groupthink vibe give the book an unnerving Stepford Wives quality, and Skyhorse’s satirical eye is sharp, from unctuous service workers (“Have a mindful day!”) to the cruelty of law enforcement officers’ just-following-orders ethos. Skyhorse doesn’t quite untangle the mysteries he sets up, but he cultivates an engrossing Kafkaesque atmosphere across the novel.

A well-imagined allegory of divisive racial politics.