What are some important aspects of the book The Color of Water by James McBride?

The most
important two aspects of are its individual functioning as a memoir of 's
life as well as a tribute to his mother. McBride makes the incredibly bold artistic choice of
narrating the story from not only his point of view, but his mother's as well. While this might
seem immediately presumptuous, it reveals through the course of the narrative a profound
connection between McBride and his mother, and is incredibly reverent to her as an influencing
factor in McBride's life. We begin to see a portrait of the author's mother as simultaneously
the larger-than-life figure that she was to McBride as a child, as well as the human being as
McBride recognized her in his adult years.

The struggles that McBride
endures as a child in seeking his own identity are paralleled with the struggles that his mother
endured for being a white woman that chose to marry a black man in the 40's. The audacity that
the reader may perceive in McBride's choice to speak for his mother is noticeably akin to the
audacity of McBride's mother that society perceived, though she was only choosing to be with who
she loved. These alternating narratives create many similar such
parallels.