This is some real white people on their shit again - said as a yt ppl. Characters read as inauthentic props. This is a very real history and characters set in its midst deserve far more respect in their development. She tries using a vernacular for her Black characters but it reads so inauthentic that I, a lily-white person who went into reading this blind on my mom's recommendation, could tell the book was written by a White woman within a couple pages. AAVE is a legit dialect and this feels like the author is inserting casual slang and incorrect grammar and calling it the same which, at best, is just rude, inaccurate, lazy, and reads poorly. I was excited for the premise but this execution is terrible and a disservice to history imo. If you're going to profit off a trafficked and exploited people's history, the literal bare minimum least you could do is not caricaturize them.