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A review by gcarreira
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
2.0
Oprah’s review of this book went something along the lines of “I’ve never read anything like this before” and I would agree with that: I’ve never before read a book where multiple chapters are set from the perspective of a child r*pist!!!!!!!!!!
I went into this book thinking it would be about unpacking the history of racism and slavery in the United States, and there is definitely a lot of discussion of the history of slavery in the main character’s family, but for the most part discussion of that happens in the last 200 pages. The first 600 are primarily about how men and women in the MC’s family have been r*ped for generations as children. It was actually SICKENING. I don’t know how I finished this book because let me tell you some of these chapters were just unbearable as you read from the perspective of the victims and the r*pists.
If you can look past those absolutely sickening parts of the book (not to mention the actual descriptions of slavery towards the end, which are disgusting but at least feel like they contribute to the plot and the MC’s mission as a historian), you’ll still end up not liking this book because the main character is so unbelievably annoying!!!! We meet the main character when she is 8 and she is so annoying up until she turns 33 at the end. I don’t think I liked her at all the entire time, and for some reason the other characters around her (somehow only men other than her mother and sisters) adore her because she is supposedly just SO smart and SO hardworking but in reality all we see of her for the first 600 pages is her s*x life??? Like I swear there is no mention of the MC working hard during college at all and then at some point there’s a time skip and it’s like “wow look at her she graduated at the top of her class!!”
In conclusion, this book is in desperate need of a backbone and a plot summary that accurately describes what most of the book is about, which is r*pe. The reader and main character just flail around in a soul crushing loop of trauma dumping, addiction, and abuse for the first 600 pages and only at the end does this book do what I believe it’s meant to do: tell the story of a woman rising up and unveiling the history of her family in order to pay homage to her ancestors. That part of the book just should have started 600 pages earlier, because THAT was actually good.
Maybe this book is more impactful if you’re reading it as a black woman who has some kind of personal connection to the events in this story but honestly I find it hard to imagine most of this book as anything other than triggering and disgusting, and in a way that never feels resolved or overcome.
I went into this book thinking it would be about unpacking the history of racism and slavery in the United States, and there is definitely a lot of discussion of the history of slavery in the main character’s family, but for the most part discussion of that happens in the last 200 pages. The first 600 are primarily about how men and women in the MC’s family have been r*ped for generations as children. It was actually SICKENING. I don’t know how I finished this book because let me tell you some of these chapters were just unbearable as you read from the perspective of the victims and the r*pists.
If you can look past those absolutely sickening parts of the book (not to mention the actual descriptions of slavery towards the end, which are disgusting but at least feel like they contribute to the plot and the MC’s mission as a historian), you’ll still end up not liking this book because the main character is so unbelievably annoying!!!! We meet the main character when she is 8 and she is so annoying up until she turns 33 at the end. I don’t think I liked her at all the entire time, and for some reason the other characters around her (somehow only men other than her mother and sisters) adore her because she is supposedly just SO smart and SO hardworking but in reality all we see of her for the first 600 pages is her s*x life??? Like I swear there is no mention of the MC working hard during college at all and then at some point there’s a time skip and it’s like “wow look at her she graduated at the top of her class!!”
In conclusion, this book is in desperate need of a backbone and a plot summary that accurately describes what most of the book is about, which is r*pe. The reader and main character just flail around in a soul crushing loop of trauma dumping, addiction, and abuse for the first 600 pages and only at the end does this book do what I believe it’s meant to do: tell the story of a woman rising up and unveiling the history of her family in order to pay homage to her ancestors. That part of the book just should have started 600 pages earlier, because THAT was actually good.
Maybe this book is more impactful if you’re reading it as a black woman who has some kind of personal connection to the events in this story but honestly I find it hard to imagine most of this book as anything other than triggering and disgusting, and in a way that never feels resolved or overcome.