A review by kimmeyer
Men We Reaped: A Memoir by Jesmyn Ward, Jesmyn Ward

4.0

Ward is a beautiful writer. This book is strong when she's talking about her immediate family, but to me this book struggled when she wrote about the deaths of the four men other than her brother. Those sections feel unmoored, like they don't have enough detail to give you a strong sense of them as people. I've read other accounts of the struggles of being young and black in the south, but this particular memoir fails to contextualize those lives and deaths in a way that convincingly connects the individual to the societal. I mostly really liked the book as a whole, however, because the majority of it is actually about her mother and her siblings and her own experiences.