RaveWorld Literature TodayConsequential and searing ... While many will read Joudah’s text as an indictment of this moment, it is equally important to understand it as an articulation of a continuum of violence that long predates this moment ... Joudah grapples with the experiential and the relational, the layers of which exist well beyond the realm of language, which is perhaps one of the most compelling drivers of this book.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksWhile Coates alludes to and references some of the structural and historical issues that create these flashpoint moments in American racism, I think he could have done more to help readers — and his son — make sense of these events ... many white critics reviewing the book have missed the fact that what this book does best is state plainly that we have a serious, lingering, and deeply complex division in this society between those who consider themselves white, and those who are decidedly not; that no solution will come easily or quickly, nor without significant upheaval in the lives of all Americans ... by allowing America to overhear him talking to his son about that trajectory, he is speaking to America, after all. In this, Coates has done something significant, writing what every conscious person of color knows deeply, feels deeply, and navigates daily in their lives.
