PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewMacy, for her part, works hard to illuminate the brothers’ story, including the context of the social lives, personalities and cultures of the other so-called freaks among whom Willie and George spent decades ... Macy is a gifted storyteller and a dogged researcher, and readers will be riveted by her account of Harriet Muse’s struggle to find her sons ... Yet it remains hard for a book like this, about African-American victims of white violence, to escape an old way of telling American stories. In that old way, black people’s suffering provokes entertained voyeurism or self-congratulatory pity, not the kind of empathy that leads to solidarity and action. Beth Macy grapples long and hard with that conundrum. Readers alone can decide whether she escapes it.
