INVISIBLE BOY

For readers of Educated by Tara Westover, Negroland: A Memoir by Margo Jefferson, Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward, Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat, and Boy Erased: A Memoir by Garrard Conley.

INVISIBLE BOY is a memoir of race, religion and displacement. Harrison's account amplifies a voice rarely heard: the child at the centre of an interracial adoption. This powerful memoir invites readers to de-centre whiteness as its narrator learns to do the same and considers the controversial practice from the perspective of the families being ripped apart, and the children being stripped of their culture, in order to fill demand for babies in evangelical households.

Harry is a black boy adopted as an infant by a white evangelical family. He is raised among religious fundamentalists in a suburb of Vancouver, Canada, by an American mother who chooses colour blindness and cultism over reality. In order to receive love, Harry must do the same. Isolated and demoralized, the boy spends his childhood steeped in zealotry, paranoia and prejudice.

But Harry grows up, and after a lifetime of internalized anti-blackness, he begins to redefine his terms and reconsider his history. His journey from white cult to black consciousness culminates in a reunion with his biological mother, who waited 25 years to tell him the truth: she wanted to keep him. It simply wasn't an option. The young West African woman was isolated and demoralized by the same community, and she was powerless to prevent an adoption that never stopped feeling like an abduction.
INVISIBLE BOY is a jaw-dropping account of religious brainwashing and intergenerational trauma. Harrison Mooney's wry, everyday prose brings accessibility and levity to a deeply personal tale of identity: a black coming-of-age narrative set in a world with little love for black boys, like a nonfiction companion to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

Harrison Mooney is a writer and journalist from Vancouver. Born to a West African immigrant mother, Harrison was adopted as an infant by a white family and raised in the bible belt of British Columbia, Canada before reconnecting with his biological family as an adult. Harrison has worked for The Vancouver Sun for nearly a decade as a reporter, editor and columnist. His writing has also appeared in The National Post, Yahoo, The Guardian, and Maclean's. He lives in East Vancouver with his family.