PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewTubbs excavates and honors [...] traditions via the mothers ... Tubbs’s portrait is an intimate narrative that aims to link not only Little, King and Baldwin, but all Black mothers, including herself (she gave birth to a son while researching and writing the book). This gives rise to an inclusive tone that can be alternately comforting and jarring: comforting when Tubbs writes of \'our\' shared experience as mothers; jarring when the narrative suddenly shifts to the second-person \'you.\' Still, the intersections she highlights are beautiful — and including more of them might have enriched the story even more ... There are any number of places where the reader yearns for more anecdotes, more description and, most of all, more of the mothers’ own voices ... Try as she might, not even another mother can salvage such monumental erasures.
Susan Straight
PositiveThe New York TimesThere are dozens of ancestors in this well-researched book. At times, too many ... We sense that she wants to give all of them their due. But in the process, the reader senses that two of the most important figures in her life—her mother and father—remain mysteriously shadowed, only half complete ... Straight writes with aching tenderness ... From the Sims side of the family, Straight painstakingly researches Henry Ely, a Cherokee who loved two slave sisters in antebellum Tennessee ... In the end, Straight’s book is about far more than a country of women. It’s an ode to the entire multiracial, transnational tribe she claims as her own.
