If Upward Bound hooked you with its unsentimental view of mobility's machinery, We Are Not Ourselves by tracks those forces across generations.
Buy on Bookshop.orgWhy It's Your Next Read
- Decades-long chronicle shows compound interest of choices
- Medical & workplace systems rendered w/ procedural detail
- Messy scaffolding—mentorship & family as nonlinear forces
- Progressive hope meets skeptical realism, no easy outs
If you loved Upward Bound for its refusal to soft-pedal the machinery of American mobility—the benefit traps, the medical paperwork, the workplace indignities that compound across decades—Matthew Thomas gives you a multi-generational chronicle that tracks those same institutional forces with procedural precision and zero sentimentality. This is the longitudinal accountability you've been waiting for.
Thomas renders mentorship, family scaffolding, and incremental uplift as the messy, non-linear processes they actually are: plausible triumphs next to candid failures, progressive hope cut with skeptical realism, human-scale choices under systemic pressure.
It's a novel that doubles as a case-study, teaching by immersion how policy and personal agency collide.
What Readers Are Saying
"The second half of this book is an epic, gut-punch of a page-turner. Highly recommended." — Patrick Brown, Goodreads
"The story is so remarkable and emotional that it deserves to flow and gradually reveal itself to the reader. I loved Matthew Thomas's sparse writing style..." — Denise, Goodreads
"…what you have here is a work of a genius, but he's a genius with a heart as big as his brain." — Aidan Byrne, Goodreads
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