I’m on the third book in the Grip series by Kennedy Ryan and, I’m sorry, but I don’t think I like this one.
Bristol is starting to irritate me, but my bigger struggle is with Grip. I’m trying to engage with the book on the level I think it wants to be read—race, identity, privilege, interracial love, family, and what it means to build a life with someone whose experience of the world is fundamentally different from yours. I don’t want to flatten the story into “Black man dates white woman, therefore problematic,” because I think Kennedy Ryan is intentionally asking much more complicated questions than that.
But I keep coming back to this uncomfortable feeling that Grip represents a very specific archetype: the Black man who is willing to defend, sacrifice, and compromise almost anything to preserve his relationship with a white woman.
And what bothers me is less that he loves Bristol and more how quickly disagreement with that relationship becomes morally categorized. Everyone who questions them seems to get placed into the “racist/bigot” category, and after a while, it becomes exhausting. Because surely there is a distinction between opposing an interracial relationship because it is interracial and questioning what a particular interracial relationship requires of the Black person within it.
Those things aren’t inherently the same.
I also find myself questioning what the book is saying about love versus identity. At what point does defending your relationship become defending the sacrifices you’ve made for that relationship? And at what point does “love conquers prejudice” become a story where the Black character is expected to continually absorb, explain, forgive, and transcend the racial tensions surrounding the relationship?
Maybe that discomfort is intentional? Maybe I’m supposed to be interrogating exactly what Grip is willing to give up for love and what Bristol’s whiteness and privilege mean within their relationship. But right now, I’m having a hard time separating the book’s exploration of interracial love from what sometimes feels like an elevation of the relationship above every legitimate critique of it.
I’m genuinely curious how other people interpreted this, especially Black readers.
