RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe friendship between two extraordinary Black women forms the book’s core. In warm, plain-spoken prose, Copeland details Wilkinson’s bravery ... We also feel the transcendent joy that floods [Copeland] when she dances; the juxtaposition of ballet’s exquisiteness with its particular toll on Black dancers is startling. This book is a generous, sincere love letter to Wilkinson, who died in 2018, but it’s also a love letter to liberation ... This bighearted memoir is an antidote to that marginalization.
Evette Dionne
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewVulnerable, richly detailed personal stories ... Her critique of online dating as a fat person is more trenchant because she recognizes her own internalized fat-phobia ... Especially compelling are Dionne’s more theoretical exercises: when she imagines childhood in a world without a trace of fat-phobia ... If there is a missed opportunity in Weightless, I wish she’d have asserted more clearly not just that fat people shouldn’t be subject to criticism and discrimination, but also that they have a right to exist — period ... We see traces of latent fat-phobia poking through an otherwise incisive and gratifying critique. Of course, Dionne acknowledges her internalized bias; and so her book is to be taken as an “excavation” by someone who is, by her own admission, a work in progress. This, too, is a gift of Weightless: the chance to witness what it looks like to do the hard, continuing work of self-inquiry in pursuit of a better world.
Mary-Alice Daniel
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... captivating and lyrical ... Mary-Alice Daniel reaches boldly into her past across Nigeria, England and the United States to inspect the pressures and nuances of mythology, ancestry, colonization and religion ... Daniel embraces the complexity of being simultaneously drawn to and repelled by our roots ... In asking what makes a person, a place, a family or a tribe, Daniel dives deep into language, including gorgeously rendered etymologies of her name, the names of places she’s lived and those of the entities who form her personal cosmology of idols, like Queen Calafia, the fictional Black empress after whom California, Daniel’s current home, is named ... Daniel is a poet, and on occasion her observations tilt a paragraph abruptly toward free-form verse. But her writing remains striking, discerning and haunting ... Read this book once for the furious beauty of Daniel’s prose. Read it again for a master class in how we might finally come to tell our stories on our own terms.
