As an adoptee, you know I’m on the look out for anything with adoption. So naturally I had to read To Have and Have More. This fiction book explores identity, what it means to be perfect, and the layers of privilege and wealth. Keep reading this book review of To Have and Have More for my full thoughts.
Summary
Derrymore Academy, circa 2007, is home to teenagers who have their eyebrows shaped and their sweet sixteens tented. Their first kisses arrive around the same time as their boating licenses and they celebrate getting their braces off with Mediterranean vacations. It is here that Emery Hooper, adopted at birth into the country club set, thrives.
The one blight on her otherwise perfect life? Lilah Chang. The Chinese-American student is the embarrassing epitome of every Asian stereotype Emery despises—and is inexplicably determined to become Emery’s friend.
Lilah is both astounded and hopelessly self-conscious around the casual wealth at Derrymore, where students treat laptops as disposable and weekend spending is limited only by imagination and audacity. Desperate to fit in, she’s fascinated by an Asian girl who is somehow wholly comfortable in a white world.
When Emery’s wealth isn’t enough to protect her from increasing microaggressions, Lilah and Emery develop a complicated friendship that tentatively unites them against the undercurrent of white privilege at their school. As they speed toward graduation and Ivy League applications, Lilah and Emery circle around the truth that still irrevocably separates them: With enough money, actions don’t have consequences.
Review
(Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher. This has not impacted my review which is unbiased and honest.)
To Have and Have More features transracial adoption and the ways in which our identity is formed. There’s these layers of Otherness which we feel even in our own homes. The ways our extended family reminds us of our appearance, the off handed comments, the micro aggressions. It made me remember growing up and things I brushed off and ways I felt in and out of place simultaneously. How we don’t know how to apply eyeliner. For Emery, meeting Lilah causes these issues, these hidden moments, to come to the surface, and she isn’t sure she likes it.
Seeing through both Lilah and Emery’s perspectives, we see the ways in which identity, privilege, and wealth intertwine. There’s envy, love, and resentment on both sides. Whether it be the little symbols of weather and status that we’ve missed the memo on, or the parent dynamics, there’s these doubly layered feelings of envy. For Emery, her wealth and status smooth out many of the comments she receives – in the effort not to rock the boat – while Lilah presents this challenge for her. It makes her see the ways in which they are treated similarly, and differently, and forces her to have to question.
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To Have and Have More doesn’t offer easy answers and it is more an exploration than an answer to these topics. Where does the role of consequences, justice, accountability lie in the midst of these settings? If we make the rules, how do we handle the punishment? Find To Have and Have More on Goodreads, Storygraph, Amazon, Bookshop. org, Blackwells, & Libro. fm.