Interesting concept of being able to re-visit your past lives, but a warning of the consequences of going too far down the rabbit hole. ( )

The problem with this book for me is that if you read it as a reincarnation skeptic, it looks a lot like a bunch of white male characters appropriating the suffering of slavery and the rape of Nanking for their middle-class mid-life crises. If you buy into the reincarnation conceit, then you have the optics of white guys getting a free pass for all the cultural appropriation they want.

And we're asked to sympathize with the slave owner who nobly decides to free his slaves once he is dead and cannot profit from them anymore??

AWKWARD!

p.s., Even more awkward:

Here's a mind bender. When I wrote my review, I followed the Goodreads author link to Brian McDonald and was presented with the image of a white New York Times writer, and it seemed odd that he'd even write this story. So I just did some additional research and apparently that link is in error. This is the actual author: https://writeinvisibleink.com/. I feel like knowing McDonald is African American should change how I process the story, but so far it hasn't. The surface read remains a bunch of white guys #winning. I am now hyperconscious, however, of the biases I held and the assumptions I was making while I read the book and wrote my review. I'll be dwelling on this and will have to see where it leads.

By the way, I submitted a notice about the author mix-up and it has since been fixed on Goodreads. ( )