RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewSomebody’s Daughter is the heart-wrenching yet equally witty and wondrous story of how Ford came through the fire and emerged triumphant, as her own unapologetic, Black-girl self ... Ford’s brilliance as a writer, her superpower, is a portrayal of her mother — who remains unnamed — that is both damning and sympathetic, one that renders this complicated older Black woman’s full humanity ... Ford powerfully captures the complicated mix of meanness, frustration and obsessive mothering familiar to so many Black daughters ... Ford found her voice as a writer, and that helped her see that she’s not just somebody’s daughter: She’s somebody.
Yaa Gyasi
RaveThe Women\'s Review of Books... haunting ... astute and timely ... This is a novel for the moment in ways Gyasi couldn’t have possibly anticipated ... Gyasi powerfully captures Nana’s slide into addiction, and the ways his loved ones grapple helplessly with that descent ... With a surgeon’s precision, Gyasi slices open the ways racist attitudes overlay and complicate Gifty’s once fervent faith in God vis-à-vis evangelicalism ... Animal activists be warned: The detailed account of the narrator’s experiments on mice are unflinching ... I admit, however, that my eyes sometimes glazed over the scientific terms that populate the text ... Yet the novel beautifully examines the hardships created by abandonment and displacement, and the attendant shame that comes from both; this motif is conveyed via a vivid Ghanaian-immigrant world, steeped in its own stew of American promise and failure. And so, it’s okay that the novel conveniently gives Gifty a life partner in a courtship that happens off-camera as a tidy plot point. This slim book’s ambitious and compelling interest is in greater relationships than mere romantic ones. In fact, the novel itself is one long meditation on life’s big themes of love and loss, and one woman’s quest to understand the human condition as she grapples with both.
Candacy Taylor
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review... make[s] powerfully clear the magnitude of the injustices and harrowing encounters endured by African-Americans traveling by \'open\' road, as well as of their quiet acts of rebellion and protest, which went far beyond having to find alternative places to eat, sleep and buy gas ... deeply researched ... a fascinating history of black travel as chronicled in the Green Book, the popular and essential guidebook for African-Americans founded by Victor Green in 1936 ... equally the story of vital black businesses that became safe havens and refuges along \'lonely stretches of America’s perilously empty roads\' .. Taylor is not interested in presenting the Green Book as a time capsule. She wants to situate it within America’s \'ongoing struggle with race and social mobility,\' and makes the disheartening yet persuasive argument that the problems African-Americans face today are \'arguably just as debilitating and deadly as the problems the Green Book helped black people avoid more than 80 years ago.\' To prove her point, in an extraordinary feat of research, Taylor went on a nearly 40,000-mile road trip to visit 5,000 Green Book sites and photograph many of them.
Imani Perry
RaveWomen\'s Review of Books... both an excruciating and exhilarating experience. It is not unlike raising a Black boy in America. It prompts a complex rush of emotions. I highlighted so many passages, lines that I wanted to remember, to use as inspiration—including those that made me wince in uncomfortable recognition—I simply decided to reread the book as soon as I’d finished it ... The book evokes so well the myriad ways in which Black parents and children alike must be intentional about how we inhale and exhale. And frankly, given this moment in which we live, the book reminds us all to take a deep breath. It is so startling and apt and timely that you will likely devour it the way a swimmer takes a giant gulp of air as she cracks the surface of the water—greedily and gratefully ... We’ve not seen this intimacy from Perry’s writing before ... That Perry can navigate so seamlessly between interiority and the interrogation of American culture is astonishing ... To be clear, we’ve never seen a book like this before. This is a beacon for any young African American trying to swim through the waters of that unique antagonism that America has long held for its Black citizens, be they man-child or woman-child ... Imani Perry also is not a romantic, but she is a woman of deep devotion, and that is what will bring you back to this slim, penetrating book many times, like rereading your favorite psalm; or perhaps more precisely like a morning meditation, deep breaths filling your lungs with air, leaving you in a state of grace.
Sarah M. Broom
RaveWomen\'s Review of Books... evocative and startling ... What elevates this memoir from an account of growing up in and getting away from a crumbling house in a depressed neighborhood of a mythologized city is Broom’s language. Her descriptions are tactile and redolent, her observations stunningly astute. The writing itself conveys a dignity that permeates Sarah and her family members’ lives despite the tenuousness, and the poverty that hovered, threatening to engulf. You come to know and understand the inhabitants of the Yellow House, even as you come to know the ways in which the house shaped and defined them, and the ways it didn’t ... The section of the memoir that describes the impact of Hurricane Katrina on Broom’s family members is the most haunting. To read her brothers’ firsthand chronicles of harrowing escape, now, fourteen years after, is in some ways more profound for its distance and simplicity of fact ... The depth and nuance of this story is a tribute to Broom’s patience in waiting to tell it, in letting it nest so to speak, for more than a decade after the Water. This is a story that has marinated, steeped itself in time and distance and maturing black womanhood to emerge as an arresting narrative on its way to becoming a classic ... the story of Sarah M. Broom’s surviving, and thriving, which is to say the full emergence of her voice. You will want to hear everything she has to say.