In Conversation: On What’s Mine and Yours: A Novel

Jenna Bush Hager is the co-host of the fourth hour of the Today show with Hoda Kotb, and the founder of the Today book club, Read with Jenna. She is the author of The New York Times bestselling Everything Beautiful in Its Time (William Morrow) and co-author of Ana’s Story: A Journey of Hope (HarperCollins), based on the life of a 17-year-old Latin American single mother infected with HIV. Hager has also written two children’s books – Our Great Big Backyard and Read All About It – the latter with her mother, Laura, as well as New York Times bestseller Sisters First, written with her sister, Barbara.

Naima Coster is the author of Halsey Street: A Novel, a 2018 Kirkus Prize for Fiction finalist. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Kweli, The Paris Review, Catapult, and elsewhere. In What’s Mine and Yours: A Novel (Grand Central Publishing), a community in the Piedmont of North Carolina rises in outrage as a county initiative draws students from the largely Black east side of town into predominantly white high schools on the west. For two students, Gee and Noelle, the integration sets off a chain of events that will entwine their two families together in unexpected ways over the next 20 years. Jade – Gee’s steely, ambitious mother – is determined to give her son the tools he’ll need to survive as a sensitive, anxious, young Black man. Noelle’s headstrong mother, Lacey May, is a white woman who refuses to see the half-Latina side of her daughters. When Gee and Noelle’s paths collide, the two seemingly disconnected families begin to form deeply knotted, messy ties that will shape the trajectory of their adult lives. And as love is built and lost, the past is never left far behind. Esquire noted that “Coster’s remarkable characters, each one of them authentically flawed and gorgeously realized, propel this wise and loving story ever forward, making for a graceful meditation on family, inequality, and the ties that bind.”