2025 Non-Fiction Q3
Invisible Boy - Harrison Mooney
I bought this book two years ago and it’s been sitting on my “to be read” pile ever since. I kept trying to find the time to sit down and read it but never felt like I had the attention span it deserved.
When I heard that Harrison Mooney was from Abbotsford I was shocked. The very religious extra conservative town we both grew up in doesn’t have a ton of arts and culture. No real writing circles (or even secular book groups) that I know about growing up here. It is a unique place, a Bible Belt located in what the rest of the country thinks of as the hippy west coast. His memoir deals with many of the things I’ve heard whispers of in this town and I can’t wait to read it in his own words.
Harrison Mooney was born to a West African mother and adopted as an infant by a white evangelical family. Growing up as a Black child, Harry’s racial identity is mocked and derided, while at the same time he is made to participate in the fervour of his family’s revivalist church. Confused and crushed by fundamentalist dogma and consistently abused for his colour, Harry must transition from child to young adult while navigating and surviving zealotry, paranoia and prejudice.
After years of internalized anti-Blackness, Harry begins to redefine his terms and reconsider his history. His journey from white cult to Black consciousness culminates in a moving reunion with his biological mother, who waited twenty-five years for the chance to tell her son the truth: she wanted to keep him.
This powerful memoir considers the controversial practice of transracial adoption from the perspective of families that are torn apart and children who are stripped of their culture, all in order to fill evangelical communities’ demand for babies. Throughout this most timely tale of race, religion and displacement, Harrison Mooney’s wry, evocative prose renders his deeply personal tale of identity accessible and light, giving us a Black coming-of-age narrative set in a world with little love for Black children.
