HOW BRIGHT THE PATH GROWS: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington

HOW BRIGHT THE PATH GROWS: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington
MARCIA CHATELAIN
Pantheon Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Franchise comes the little-known story of the pioneering Black women artists and activists who were seen, but barely heard, at the 1963 March on Washington.

There is no shortage of footage immortalizing the men who spoke at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, when 250,000 Americans gathered beneath the Lincoln Memorial to call for an end to segregation. There were reverends and rabbis, activists and Rat-Pack icons—and of course the day's headliner, whose prophetic dream of a post-Jim Crow world has forever defined the Civil Rights Movement. But there is no “class photo” of the Black women who helped organize the march, performed on its main stage, or were honored during its “Tribute to Negro Women Fighters for Freedom.”

In How Bright the Path Grows, Marcia Chatelain weaves a gleaming group portrait of these singular women. Among this cohort were several household names: vaudeville icon Josephine Baker; civil rights activist Rosa Parks gospel legend Mahalia Jackson, and Daisy Bates, champion of the Little Rock Nine. But many were relative unknowns, including Eva Jessye, the choir director who designed the day’s musical program, and Anna Hedgeman, the coordinator who pushed in the eleventh hour for a tribute to Black women’s work.

How Bright the Path Grows is a scintillating group biography, rendering the lives of thirteen Black women visionaries—some famous, others soon to be—in novelistic detail and like never seen before.

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My Review: Misogyny and sexism, the Dynamic Duo of millennia of Western (and Eastern...human, it seems) culture, were sadly never challenged in Civil Rights-era activism. Men were, as many of us remember and most of us can see on YouTube, front and center as speakers (thus implicitly leaders) of a march that took a mere twenty-two years from initial proposal by the Pullman Porters Union until it took place in 1963...after a gay guy, Bayard Rustin, and quite some several women (the author chose thirteen) got tired of hearing all the reasons the March couldn't be allowed and started getting it done.

On playing key roles leading and conceiving of the March, then discovering there were to be zero women speakers on the stage with the men, much outrage was unleashed...it's darn good reading, as Author Chatelain crafts voices for these silenced speakers. It was not out of some sense of fairness that the men who spoke were forced, after much recrimination, to allow a few women into the podium to take a speechless bow. It is still shameful, and a significant ding on the lasting legacy of the March, and really brings down my esteem for these men perpetuating the same irrational victimization they were protesting being subjected to.

It was an exciting read to me...felt like I was being let in on a well-kept secret...and I appreciated the Epilogue, with its extended tracking of the thirteen women restored to the spotlight after the the March took place. It's all too common to end an event-focused group biography like this thinking, "...and then what happened to them? what did they do then?" In this work, we get enough information to be certain these extraordinary women didn't go quietly into obscurity, though they are now obscure to the twenty-first century reading public.

I have to mention the author's extensive, broad-based Notes on her sources. There are enough leads for future scholars to pick up the gauntlet against silence Author Chatelain has thrown down in writing this book.

USING GIFT CARDS: Non-Fiction

Now that The Big Day's come and gone, lots of us have some giftcards, or some actual filthy lucre, to spend. There being no better way to spend that haul than on books, here are some reasonably priced options you might not've thought of to get your story needs met. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

QUEEN MOTHER: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore
ASHLEY D. FARMER
Pantheon Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2025

2025 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for Biography!

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: From an award-winning historian of radical Black politics comes the definitive biography of Queen Mother Audley Moore—foremother of the Black Nationalism movement and trailblazer in the fight for reparations

In the world of radical Black politics, the name Audley Moore commands unquestioned respect. Across the nine decades of her life, Queen Mother Moore distinguished herself as a leading progenitor of Black Nationalism, the founder of the modern reparations movement, and a mentor to some of America's most influential Black activists from her homes in North Philadelphia and Harlem.

And yet, she is far less remembered than many of her peers and protégés—Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ahmad, to name just a few—and the ephemera of her life are either lost or plundered. In Queen Mother, celebrated writer and historian Ashley D. Farmer restores Moore's faded portrait, delivering the first ever definitive account of her life and enduring legacy.

Deeply researched and richly detailed, Queen Mother is more than just the biography of an American icon. It's a narrative history of 20th-century Black radicalism, told through the lens of the woman whose grit and determination sustained the movement.

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My Review: Listen to the author on the Smarty Pants podcast!

Black nationalism. Reparations for slavery's ongoing horrors. A long lifetime of refusing to sit down and shut up, refusing to be a good girl, declining to accept partial and insincere and less-than sops and stop-gaps. "Queen Mother" is a very good title for Audley Moore and a good character analysis of her.

It pains me I knew little about her until now, until someone pulled together threads her proteges had deliberately unpicked and appropriated. She was truly unforgivable to the PTB within and without the Civil Rights movement because she was that powerless victim, a woman; yet her every act and every word gave the lie to that characterization. No one anywhere ever comes across less like a victim than Audley Moore.

She got done wrong to all the damn time, but that did not make her a victim...an identity she rejected, along with mainstreaming, assimilation, and capitalism. It's no wonder she was ignored by historians of the movement until now. She is guaranteed to scare, offend, and even radicalize the very kind of white guy who will commit racist violence. Since those guys are already doing it, empowered by the kakistocracy presently in government in the US, along comes Author Farmer to be introduced to Queen Mother Audley Moore as a child; galvanized by her Presence, her affect on those around her, Author Farmer became her biographer in due course. Outrage at not finding any records cache or archive of her life, the biographer took her considerable powers of persuasion and of study to pull back together the deliberately unpicked threads of an incredible life.

If you care at all about why, how, and at what our country needs to look honestly at itself, use some of your holiday pilf to procure this excellent, easy-to-read, necessary to understand book. Rescuing a major force from calculated desuetude is the act of a true apostle of truth.

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ENSHITTIFICATION: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
CORY DOCTOROW
MCD x FSG (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

WINNER OF the 2026 Locus Award for NON-FICTION!

A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2025

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Explaining the process of the “enshittification” of digital platforms over time and what to do about it.

Cory Doctorow's Enshittification takes a witty yet incisive look at the tech landscape, where platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and Google start off great—before they inevitably turn terrible. In this contemporary moment of digital decline, Doctorow explores how tech giants lure users in with convenience and then degrade their services over time, squeezing profit at the cost of user experience. With a mix of sharp humor and deep insight, he unveils the slow creep of "enshittification," turning the online world into a worse place, one algorithm at a time.

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My Review: Enshittification...it's not just for tech anymore. Popularized by Author Doctorow beginning in 2022, the word appeared online in the teens and identified exactly the capitalist endgame of charging you more and delivering less for it.

The model's simplicity is its strength. It is really down to real, enforced regulation to prevent this appalling greed from costing the users huge sums of money.

As the tech scum were willing to share their stolen good with the regulators, guess what didn't happen. Ever. The current spate of online regulation is hunky-dory by the tech scum because it makes them in an even more powerful position, requiring more and more and more data to be collected...that they can use to surveil you,to extract ever more profit from surveiling you. Ten years ago, I reviewed David Brin's THE TRANSPARENT SOCIETY, his prescient 1999 warning about today's reality: NO PRIVACY only profit.

We weren't listening then, aren't listening to Author Doctorow's blaring klaxon now, and look where it's got us. Right about now is the time to read this book and heed its warning.

Please.

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READ THIS WHEN THINGS FALL APART: Letters to Activists in Crisis
KELLY HAYES (Editor)
AK Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.00 all editions, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending May 18, 2026

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the co-author of Let This Radicalize You, a collection of letters to inspire activists to continue the fight

Organizers are well seasoned in defeat. We study movement histories, strategize collectively, and gather strength in direct action, knowing that liberation does not arrive overnight, but that the fight is worth it. But what happens when political and personal crises overlap, and the despair becomes overwhelming? Where do we turn when the process of organizing no longer feels like a site of refuge, but isolating, or even tragic?

Read This When Things Fall Apart is a collection of letters written to organizers in crisis who are struggling with the conflicts, heartbreaks, and catastrophes that activists so often experience. From grief to exhaustion, fractured relationships, state violence and interpersonal violence, the struggle for justice can be tumultuous. Each letter invites the reader to the writer’s particular world in abortion defense, organizing within prison walls, recuperating from state repression after the 2020 uprisings, or as a new parent struggling to find their way in movement spaces, and offers an authentic account of moving through difficult times.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Burnout to burning the candle at both ends, every human one of is hits the wall of what we can do eventually. Oftentimes that spells the end of that person's activism. It's hard to invent solutions to problems in yourself and your personal sphere that you've never faced before, all while trying to fix things The World℠ would prefer you left alone...and also shut up about so "They" don't have to hear it.

So what better self-gift than a collection of letters to you, teetering on the edge of or mired deep in the falling-apart of the world, that show you it's happened before and been overcome? Even if no idea in this book resonates with you...that would surprise me a lot...or you've already done it before, just the reminder that you are not the first to face this and it's been overcome before is hugely valuable. Support, understanding, fellow feeling, commiseration, are all available in these pages. It can do you a world of good just to know others are, were, have been where you are now.

We can not afford to let challenges met and surmounted by those who went on this journey of resistance to illegitimate authority before us halt our gift of energy and effort in bettering the world be snuffed out. We have a long way to go...we'll only get to the better, kinder, fairer world we want to see if we use every tool in the world's chest to make ourselves as capable and as forearmed as we can.

I recommend this read for its tonic properties because they worked on me.

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PERFECT VICTIMS AND THE POLITICS OF APPEAL
MOHAMMED EL-KURD
Haymarket Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending October 27, 2026

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.

Palestine is a microcosm of the on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured—the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial.

Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.

How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple dignity for the Palestinian.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Okay, I realize I'm unlikely to win this battle for your Yule gift card money. I'm gonna try because 2026 is not going to be an easy year for any of the warring parts of the world. In writing this book, Author El-Kurd did not use his polite appeaser voice. He does not pretend he is "reasonable" about the genocide being perpetrated on his people. He asks us to interrogate why this heinous act is not more in the foreground of our awareness. It is not the first time genocide has been perpetrated in this century. What allows that to continue?

How are good little capitalist consumers complicit in this media landscape that fails to condemn the crimes being committed? The mere mention of the crime of genocide is too divisive, is not acceptable discourse because...?

Those who dare to support Palestinians having full equal rights in their homeland are canceled, are required to prove they don't mean Israel should suffer consequences for committing this crime against humanity, and we accept it because...? Why is it The System℠ tells us what we may say about this ongoing crime against humanity and we obey?

It is time to interrogate our own (in)action regarding settler colonialism's record of injustices and crimes all over the world. Yes, that includes the US, Canada, Mexico, etc etc. This reckoning with the crimes committed by our ancestors, white people, will come no matter what. Get your mind ready by reading this book's very specific takedowns of the comfy little lies and ugly misdirections that have prevented a reckoning...but are failing at last, ever faster, ever more publicly to keep the cork in the bottle.

It's never a good idea to go into a discussion without any idea what you're discussing. Ignorance, in today's world, is a choice.

A very bad, stupid choice. Educate yourself before knowledge is thrust on you.

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ISRAEL ON THE BRINK: And the Eight Revolutions that Could Lead to Decolonization and Coexistence
ILAN PAPPÉ
Beacon Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A renowned Israeli-British historian argues Israel is fracturing, and considers the issues that must be centered for a peaceful future for Palestinians and Jews alike

In this timely book, historian Ilan Pappé argues that with the 2022 election of the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, and the subsequent Israeli war on Gaza, political fractures inherent in the Jewish state have expanded dangerously—and will potentially lead to Israel's collapse. With the goal of working towards a transition that is as peaceful as possible, Pappé sets out his thoughts about the risks and opportunities emerging from this historical moment.

Eight “mini-revolutions,” he argues, will be necessary for this more hopeful future to emerge, including:

Relocating the Right of Return of the Palestinian refugees to the center of the future vision

Establishing a new definition for the Jewish collective in historical Palestine

Finalizing a plan for the future of the Jewish settlements built in the West Bank since 1967, and

Creating a new strategy for a united Palestinian national movement

Pappé concretely envisions a more just future—a democratic decolonized state for both Palestinians and Israelis—and how we might get there.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Ilan Pappé's PALESTINE IN A WORLD ON FIRE (q.v.) contained temperature-taking interviews with many of the world's eminent progressives on the subject of public perception of Palestine. Now there comes via Beacon Press the proposal for a roadmap out of this quagmire.

Considering more West Bank Jewish settlements were approved this week I don't foresee the proposals herein being enacted or taken seriously by Israeli officials.

Considering the state of the world's opinion of Bibi and his gang of thugs, it feels more like we should be preparing for a collapse of the state.

It is a good idea for honest, morally sound people to get their heads around what eminent and practical thinkers propose as the future course of this extremely troubled part of the world. Much disgusting vitriolic hysteria will be spewed as things change, so have the antidote in your head already so as not to add to the chaos that's coming.

THE KWANZAA STORY: Celebrating Culture through Community, get one now in time for the celebration

THE KWANZAA STORY: Celebrating Culture through Community
ALLIAH L. AGOSTINI (Illus. Olivia H. Smith)
becker&mayer! kids (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 all editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Discover the history and importance of Kwanzaa, a week-long December holiday celebrated in Black, African, and African American culture.

In The Kwanzaa Story, little Alliah (of The Juneteenth Story fame) is all grown up and, along with her husband LeVaur, teaches their children Daphne and Alistair why they celebrate Kwanzaa as a family and as a community. This beautifully illustrated storybook shares the origins of the holiday—rooted in Africa, born in Los Angeles—giving historical and cultural context on how a joyful celebration was birthed after the Watts Rebellion and during the Civil Rights Movement. The journey includes:

The history of the holiday, complete with timeline

Key figures of the Civil Rights Movement and their part in the creation of Kwanzaa

The seven guiding principles of Kwanzaa, known as Nguza Saba

The seven core symbols used during Kwanzaa rituals, including the kinara (candle holder) and the mishumaa saba (the seven candles in red, green, and black)

How Kwanzaa is celebrated today

And more!

2025 marks the 60th observance of Kwanzaa. The Kwanzaa Story offers Black, African, and African American children the opportunity to connect with their culture and the holiday in a meaningful way, and to see themselves and their family traditions represented on the page with accuracy and joy. This book also exposes children of different backgrounds to a new end-of-year cultural celebration, taking them on an engaging and educational journey about the principles and traditions of the holiday. This visually captivating guide to understanding Kwanzaa encourages young readers to connect with the holiday and its social impact.

Follow along as Alliah and her family discover the cultural significance of Kwanzaa's principles and symbols, providing a tangible element to the holiday that will allow kids and family members to fully and joyfully participate in its celebration. Readers of all ages will love learning about the amazing history and traditions of Kwanzaa through the wise and educational storytelling in The Kwanzaa Story.

The Holiday Celebration series from becker&mayer! kids honors the diverse holidays and milestones that shape the cultural fabric of the United States. Though these traditions may have originated elsewhere, brought to our shores by ancestors from around the world, they have endured and evolved to weave the vibrant tapestry of American life. The series includes picture books and their companion kid-friendly cookbooks that share stories uniquely representative of the American experience--an experience that is multilayered, eclectic, inclusive, and joyfully beautiful.

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My Review: Handsome artwork complements the story of how this celebration of the importance, centrality, and personal relevance of community building and membership to the Black American, and broader African diaspora, cultures came to be. 2025 marks the sixtieth celebration of the seven principles:

...restated here for your newly-independent reader. These expressions of the principles, like the text more generally, are pitched at that spot where some things will require some adult input about their meanings, while most will be readily decodable for the seven- or eight-year-old just starting independent reading. Most would challenge an average six-year-old reader unless they're quite advanced.

begin at the beginning

typical text/art spreads

There is a very helpful, quite concise, timeline of the Black cultural holidays and their origins:

The author invites readers to make, or consider how, their own connection to Kwanzaa is or was formed:

A lovely gift for a young Black child, a family needing to explain their holiday tradition to a child, or just a seeker after more satisfying ritual acknowledgments of the irreplaceable bonds of community membership.

THE PRICE FOR THEIR POUND OF FLESH: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation, capitalism has a lot to answer for

THE PRICE FOR THEIR POUND OF FLESH: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation
DAINA RAMEY BERRY
Beacon Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Groundbreaking look at slaves as commodities through every phase of life, from birth to death and beyond, in early America

In life and in death, slaves were commodities, their monetary value assigned based on their age, gender, health, and the demands of the market. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives—including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and death—in the early American domestic slave trade. Covering the full "life cycle," historian Daina Ramey Berry shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and protect their investments. Illuminating "ghost values" or the prices placed on dead enslaved people, Berry explores the little-known domestic cadaver trade and traces the illicit sales of dead bodies to medical schools.

This book is the culmination of more than ten years of Berry's exhaustive research on enslaved values, drawing on data unearthed from sources such as slave-trading records, insurance policies, cemetery records, and life insurance policies. Writing with sensitivity and depth, she resurrects the voices of the enslaved and provides a rare window into enslaved peoples' experiences and thoughts, revealing how enslaved people recalled and responded to being appraised, bartered, and sold throughout the course of their lives. Reaching out from these pages, they compel the reader to bear witness to their stories, to see them as human beings, not merely commodities.

A profoundly humane look at an inhumane institution, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh will have a major impact how we think about slavery, reparations, capitalism, nineteenth-century medical education, and the value of life and death.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Almost ten years ago, I read this appalling chronicle of the profit-and-loss mentality as applied to human beings.

It horrified and appalled me.

Cliometrics, the science of statistical analysis applied to databases of historical origin (eg, census data, tax rolls), is a discipline we've only developed in the past half-century or so. The wealth of data regarding enslaved people collected by different governments and organizations has made tracing the stark outlines of how the property impacted the economy; Author Daina Ramey Berry had to come along before someone got up the support and the courage...it definitely took a lot to do this work in a post-Ferguson/George Floyd world...to merge the statistical analysis of the past with the stories of the people who lived it.

No, it's not a breezy little bagatelle to read. It is a work of solid, enduring value to historians, and to historical researchers in economics and medicine and sociology and anthropology. I'm not going to apply the "a-word" to it, you know the one; it sends all y'all's wallets into torpor. Instead I'll note that the style's readable, there's flashes...rare, but there...of humor; and for the non-fiction snobs, there's no getting away from the fact that it's got deep roots in the primary and secondary sources.

There are quite a number of period illustrations to, um, liven things up. I found them somewhat distracting, which could be good when I was in a darker passage, or bad, if the illustration was cheerless. I'm glad on balance to have them included.

THE QUEEN OF SATURN AND THE PRINCE IN EXILE, Black coming-of-age novel with an SF twist

THE QUEEN OF SATURN AND THE PRINCE IN EXILE
ERRICK NUNNALLY
CLASH Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A Black nerd coming-of-age novel set in 1970s Boston about a boy who struggles to learn the truth behind his mother’s claims of otherworldly origins in the smoldering aftermath of the Civil Rights era and COINTELPRO's dying breaths.

Sean’s mother, Sojourner, consistently claims otherworldly origins—Saturn, specifically. A story he’s heard his entire life and never considered that it might be true until strange men intrude on his family’s lives. Complicating matters, his father, David, and his mother, were part of a Civil Rights era Black power group that captured the attention of the FBI.

A literal bombing put an exclamation point to the end of the organization. But as soon as Sean could read on his own, he immersed himself in science fiction, fantasy, and comic books, while largely ignoring the history of his people. That ignorance morphs into a disturbing proposition and learning the truth of his parents’ pasts could prove deadly.

Sean’s exploration introduces him to music, girls, delusions of privilege, and the thrills of revolution, all while becoming an adult. The Queen of Saturn and the Prince in Exile marries golden age sci-fi with the nostalgia of roller skates, funk, and first love.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Coming of age in 1970s Murruhkuh was pretty awful. The nightmare of Watergate and the vileness of the people who supported Nixon and then gave us the Reagan revolution was, and I say this from my own personal experience of doing it, nightmarish...conform or suffer is not new to now, nor was it new to the Nixon trauma years, nor to McCarthyism in the 1950s, nor to...you get the drift.

Always feeling torn and at sea, also not new, as you're told one thing is true but it sure doesn't look like it is has a powerful emotional cost. Paying that cost is Sean's burden. As a Black teen his emotional bills are so much more immense than any my gay atheist, but white, ass had to pay.

Sean and I shared the burden of crazy mothers. Saturn has no crust, ma'am, icy or hot or rocky...just ain't one for your people to have dug themselves into. So while my own mother was a religious nut with weird ideas about her god, her delusions were decidedly less...outré so were easier to hide.

Sean's Dad doing the good work he did to help the increasingly re-oppressed after the Civil Rights era's violent and ongoing denial and retraction of gains made impressed me. The sadness of his mother's psychotic break was intense, but I never read it as anything but psychosis. I did not question the source of the break but the sci-fi clothes she put on it were mostly just reasons to feel sadder for Sean as the coming-of-age we all must do to establish our adult selves blew his happy bubble up.

I'll call it an SF novel mostly because Sean himself needs that genre track to make his reality bearable. It's more a story about how people urgently need their stories to cope with life, and the best place to find the materials you make those stories will always be stories already told.

It's always tough to find a path through the horrors of life. This is the story of a boy becoming a man without enough of a story to hang onto, and how much that cost him in the end. Could not be more rageful, more unblinkingly aware and accusatory of the racism our country refuses to renounce and stop using to harm everyone.

Under two hundred pages of honest reflection on how each Black man is broken: By design.