RaveThe Boston GlobeWhat emerged on the page, from grade school through college to adulthood in New York, was a crescendo of this constant push/pull, both a yearning for and rejection of the embodiment of Blackness. Carroll experienced a disorienting grief, a phantom limb gesturing wildly into the atmosphere of her daily life in an isolated struggle to root out her racial identity ... Carroll unearths complex, uncomfortable truths about legacy and parenthood in her memoir’s short chapters, re-creating a child’s rich worldview with penetrative grown-up perspective. Her voice is generous, intimate, searching, and formidable, her story excavated from her core and delivered with fervor and clarity. As the book progresses, Carroll’s innermost reflections about her Black biological father feel almost as absent as he is, but her narrative raises crucial questions of self-representation, the intricacies of transracial adoption, and the nuances of group membership. She crystallizes well-founded resentments and deeply painful revelations without saddling the reader with self-pity or melodrama. She weaves in with exquisite resonance a sense of beauty, gratitude, and, ultimately, hard-won self-reconciliation and unbound joy.
