From Reconstruction, to Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement, Thomas explores fathers and sons, lovers and beloved, trauma and recovery, race and de-racination in a memoir.
Unbearably bleak yet entirely mesmerizing ... This relentless account...defies any attempt at neat summation. It is a sprawling, unwieldy, at times wildly indulgent beast of a book that a less skilled author may not have even attempted. But with a virtuosic command of language and an eagle eye for punishing detail, Thomas has rendered beautifully an excruciating existence from which it is impossible to turn away ... Gorgeous, unforgettable images ... Long and exquisitely rendered scenes of soccer-playing that amount to some of the finest father-son writing I have encountered ... It’s such a shame that he refuses to render Michaele in more than two dimensions ... Expansive and claustrophobic ... An astonishingly lucid, outright obsessive, vulnerability.
The book dwells in pressure yet gasps for beauty ... The Broken King contributes to a long legacy of Black disabled authorship from Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman to Lois Curtis, Audre Lorde and Sami Schalk ... While he tells us that suicidal ideation ceaselessly 'seduces and demands that I go,' Thomas offers readers an incantatory guide to the rhythms of remaining: 'I stay for a moment and then another.' Stay longer, please.
Absorbing ... Thomas is a captivating writer, infusing his passages with turns of phrase and language that are at once powerful and delicate, always encompassing the complexity of Black fatherhood and elegantly dissecting the consequences of societal pressure.
