I heard this as an audiobook, which may have affected my review. My main impression is that Billie acted more like a teenager than the 35 year old she was. She primarily focuses on how not having a father affected her. She had a hard time moving forward with her life, and I'm not sure I believed that a short visit back to her father's hometown is going to solve that. ( )

Characters seemed real. The plot pulled me along--read it in a couple days. Timely with current heightened attention to ongoing racism in US culture. ( )

My review of this book can be found on my Youtube Vlog at:

https://youtu.be/vdrgLXW1Yo0

Enjoy!

Alternating perspectives from several characters shows how people justify silence to protect themselves or those they love. It also slightly demonstrates how people who don't speak up can still consider themselves a "good" person. The narrative was engaging and the subject thought-provoking. ( )

This novel, with a promising premise, is a disappointment. Billie, daughter of a Black poet/activist father and a white mother who meet during Freedom Summer in Mississippi, inherits her grandmother's dilapidated Delta home and moves in, putting aside her life and job in Philadelphia. Her father Cliff died under suspicious circumstances in Greendale when Billie was three, and with her mother now also gone, she becomes more curious about him. But there's very little of Billie revealed here; in fact, her dog Rufus, also inherited, is a more sympathetic character. She becomes involved with the white son of a neighbor, finds an early chapter of a memoir written by Cliff before his death, and enlists the help of an uncle, cousin, and a scholar who's writing her father's biography. But when the mystery is solved, the climactic scene is low key and lacking drama.

Quote: "A Black man in the South walked around with a target on his back for every angry white man who felt life hadn't given him what he deserved." ( )