katdid's review against another edition
4.0
I was in New York City for about three weeks and then a mate from back home in Sydney joined me for my final ten days or so there before we pushed on to Austin and then San Francisco. I've been to the US a bunch of times; it was her second visit. I was in holiday mode and had no idea what Ferguson meant when I heard my American friends talking about it. Later, in San Francisco, a guy in a bar was complaining to my mate about the racial tensions he'd observed while studying in France and went on to say that the US had no racial tensions. Well, okay.
Somewhere along the way I started reading this because it was in the shortlist folder on my Kindle. To be honest going in I could not for the life of me remember what it was about. The opener was set in New Orleans and I was like, Of course it fucking is! on account of someone I've been trying to dis-remember who calls that city home. (New Orleans got referenced a lot in Texas.) Anyway, what I am trying to say is that Jesmyn Ward's memoir about the devastating passing of young black friends and kin was a timely and engrossing read for a white girl from the other side of the world, from a country with its own shitty history of - I'm gonna call it genocide.
Somewhere along the way I started reading this because it was in the shortlist folder on my Kindle. To be honest going in I could not for the life of me remember what it was about. The opener was set in New Orleans and I was like, Of course it fucking is! on account of someone I've been trying to dis-remember who calls that city home. (New Orleans got referenced a lot in Texas.) Anyway, what I am trying to say is that Jesmyn Ward's memoir about the devastating passing of young black friends and kin was a timely and engrossing read for a white girl from the other side of the world, from a country with its own shitty history of - I'm gonna call it genocide.
claralivesinbooks's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
medium-paced
4.5
This book was extremely raw and honest. It made me cry and feel rage about the situation Jesmyn's friends and family find themselves in. She truly honoured the important people in her life. The only reason I don't give it 5 stars is because I struggled at the beginning with the writing and it took me about half of the book to get used to it. It's not difficult or bad by any means, it's just that I'm not used to this type of writing style.
liralen's review against another edition
5.0
Most of the men in my life thought their stories, whether they were drug dealers or straight-laced, were worthy of being written about. Then, I laughed it off. Now, as I write these stories, I see the truth in their claims. (69)
I didn't mean to read this: I'd seen it on Goodreads and decided it looked too depressing and moved on. One of my professors had other ideas, though—and while just about every book he's assigned this semester has been depressing on one level or another, depressing does not mean not important.
Ward grew up poor and black and female: three strikes in the deep South. Not an easy childhood, but it was a world she could navigate; later, as a teenager and beyond, she learned to navigate other worlds, but Mississippi was always home. But then she lost one person after another, and things made less sense than ever before.
On the surface, this is a book about those losses, about grief. Ward's pain is palpable: this is the sort of grief that lasts a lifetime, in one shape or another. (I raise my eyebrows at the reviews that suggest that she has not 'processed' her grief and anger yet / should have waited to write the book—waited until when? Will there ever be a time when that grief is not there? Will there ever be a time when she should not be angry at all this needless loss?) But, beyond grief, it's an exploration of circumstance and systematic failure—systematic racism—and of how these losses, not connected on a day-by-day level, are part of a greater picture.
Yes: It's a really fucking depressing book. Achingly sad, and structured such that the reader (at least, this reader) cannot get inured to the grief throughout. And yes: it was more than worth the read.
I didn't mean to read this: I'd seen it on Goodreads and decided it looked too depressing and moved on. One of my professors had other ideas, though—and while just about every book he's assigned this semester has been depressing on one level or another, depressing does not mean not important.
Ward grew up poor and black and female: three strikes in the deep South. Not an easy childhood, but it was a world she could navigate; later, as a teenager and beyond, she learned to navigate other worlds, but Mississippi was always home. But then she lost one person after another, and things made less sense than ever before.
On the surface, this is a book about those losses, about grief. Ward's pain is palpable: this is the sort of grief that lasts a lifetime, in one shape or another. (I raise my eyebrows at the reviews that suggest that she has not 'processed' her grief and anger yet / should have waited to write the book—waited until when? Will there ever be a time when that grief is not there? Will there ever be a time when she should not be angry at all this needless loss?) But, beyond grief, it's an exploration of circumstance and systematic failure—systematic racism—and of how these losses, not connected on a day-by-day level, are part of a greater picture.
Yes: It's a really fucking depressing book. Achingly sad, and structured such that the reader (at least, this reader) cannot get inured to the grief throughout. And yes: it was more than worth the read.