We Are Not Like Them by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza Review: Friendship Fractured by a Police Shooting

We Are Not Like Them opens with a prologue in which Justin Dwyer, a 14-year-old Black boy in Philadelphia, is struck by police bullets. From there the novel pivots to its true subject: Riley and Jen, lifelong best friends whose bond is tested by Justin's death. Riley is a Black broadcast journalist who has returned to her Philadelphia hometown after a painful separation; Jen is white, and her husband is a Philadelphia police officer involved in the shooting. The structure alternates between Riley's and Jen's points of view, so the reader is moved back and forth across the racial and emotional divide the killing opens between them. First published by Atria Books in 2021 and issued in paperback in August 2022, the novel is the debut collaboration of Christine Pride — a writer and longtime publishing veteran who has held editorial posts at Doubleday, Broadway, Crown, Hyperion, and Simon & Schuster — and Jo Piazza, a bestselling author and award-winning journalist.

The novel arrived at a moment of national reckoning, and reviewers treated it accordingly. The Washington Post's review invoked the real names the prologue brought to mind — Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Philando Castile — and described the opening bluntly: "The heartbreak of the prologue was all too familiar: an unarmed Black teen, shot dead by a White police officer." That framing captures the book's deliberate strategy: it builds fiction directly on top of events readers already carry with them, then asks what those events do to an intimate relationship rather than to a courtroom or a movement. The publisher pitches it as "a powerful story about friendship, race, love, forgiveness, and justice," and that combination — headline subject matter processed through a domestic, two-woman story — is what positioned it squarely in the book-club market, where it found a wide readership.

The alternating-narration design is the book's engine. By splitting the story between a Black narrator and a white narrator, Pride and Piazza give each woman an interiority the other cannot access, and the reader watches the same events refract through two sets of assumptions about race, loyalty, marriage, and motherhood. The authors bring complementary résumés to that task: Pride's decades acquiring and editing bestselling fiction inform the book's pacing and structure, while Piazza's journalism background suits Riley's broadcast-news career. Advance praise gathered by the publisher emphasizes exactly this compulsive quality, with early readers describing finishing it in a single sitting. The novel also does something structurally honest with its premise: rather than pretending friendship can simply absorb a crisis like this, it stages the reckoning as overdue — the shooting exposes distance that was always there, which gives the central relationship real stakes beyond the news cycle.

The same focus that powers the book is also its most debatable choice. Justin's tragedy functions as a catalyst, and after the brief, brutal prologue the novel turns its attention to Riley and Jen — Justin and his family recede from the foreground. Readers who come expecting the victim's family, the investigation, or the legal aftermath to carry the narrative should know that this is a friendship story first; the case is the weather around it, not the plot. Relatedly, a substantial share of the page time belongs to Jen's reckoning, which means a story set in motion by a Black boy's death spends much of its energy on a white woman's moral education — a framing some readers will find fruitful and others will find frustrating. The register is earnest and message-forward throughout; readers who prefer their fiction oblique, ironic, or ambiguity-friendly may find the novel's emotional directness more persuasive in a discussion group than on the page alone. None of this is a flaw so much as a clear set of priorities, but they are priorities worth knowing before buying.

This is issue-driven contemporary fiction engineered for conversation — the natural pick for book clubs ready to talk about race and friendship, and for readers who like novels that grab a current of real public life and run it through personal relationships. It will suit readers of socially engaged book-club fiction who want momentum, dual perspectives, and characters forced into hard conversations they have spent years avoiding. It will frustrate readers seeking a legal procedural, a story centered on the shooting victim's family, or a subtler, less declarative treatment of its themes. As a debut collaboration, it announces Pride and Piazza as a pairing built for exactly this kind of high-concept, high-empathy storytelling.