THE DARK SIDE OF SKIN

A Black architecture student named Pedro searches for the truth behind his father’s murder while enduring Brazil’s “cordial racism.”

In the act of narratively retracing his family’s winding path of difficult decisions and dramatic consequences, Pedro must come to grips with the legacy of his father, Henrique, a public school literature teacher in Porto Alegre. In an environment of institutional racism, a disastrously poor education system, and the constant threat of random—or not-so-random—violence, Pedro maintains a life of intelligence and genuine sympathy, but underneath his surface roils an agitation of emotion, a lack of understanding stemming from his—and, as he discovers, his father’s—encounters with white Brazilians who would define his character by the color of his skin. Tenório has crafted a subtle, bluntly percussive novel that reverberates with the punches and kicks of Pedro’s family’s uneasy life, one that focuses on the question of identity. How can Pedro better know himself, know the tragedy that was his father, without painfully running headlong into the bitter facts of his and his country’s history? Amid a variety of torments, leveled occasionally by a passage of poetry or piece of good music, he learns there is no easy way to truth. When walking down the rough roads or passing by, even living inside, the concrete buildings of his hometown, he must experience what his father also lived through, endured: the feeling of loss, the struggle with the uneasy sense of not belonging, of living outside time and place, no matter how desperately he wants to fit in.

A novel that successfully examines the appalling fallacies of racism.