Honorée Fanonne Jeffers comfortably inhabits this mythic juncture, telling the stories of Black women in her genealogy with a literary style that joyfully resists easy categorization ... If the earlier chapters struggle to find their intended audience...Jeffers’s limber prose finds its stride when she talks about her mother ... Jeffers also depicts darker memories...with equal precision and clarity ... Remarkably tender ... Her tone is at once formal and familiar.
A distinctive blend of memoir and criticism, a set of fearless pieces on politics, history, art and gender in the mold of her literary forebears Toni Morrison and James Baldwin ... This book functions as a great memoir ... Jeffers’s story soars, stings and, always, sings ....
What is most exciting about this collection is that it rarely resembles many other such books by celebrated writers ... It is highly readable and, despite the sometimes painful material, entertaining ... I am deeply grateful that it invites all readers to access these most intimate human responses ... Brilliant.
[Jeffers's] newest essay collection continues to excavate gardens and graveyards, in search of roots and ghosts, all while keeping her finger on the pulse of the violence and vulnerability growing around us. Like Jeffers’s fiction, her essays have an expansiveness. They are not easy in terms of subject matter or prose, but much like Toni Morrison’s writing...they are well worth digging into ... These concepts are, in Jeffers’s hands, so beautifully rendered that her audience will be willing to accept the difficulty of the work she asks of them.
Through her steady prose, Jeffers levels sharp critiques that balance complex analysis with historical documentation, and her tone is tinged with humor and wit ... Demonstrates not only the power of storytelling, but also the necessity of it.
Lucid, unwavering prose ... Across all forms and ideas, it soars ... Jeffers is unflinching in her analysis, which is expansive enough to contain emotion and academic rigor in equal parts ... Jeffers crafts not just a history of Black women in the United States but an essential way of looking at their inheritance ... Generous, wise, and fearless, she travels through the wounds of past and present with remarkable grace and gripping narratives.
Incisive ... The more autobiographical of Jeffers’s essays are deeply affecting ... Deftly moving between sharp critique and an intimate, confessional tone, this astonishes.
