This book is so good, and yet I found myself wanting desperately for it to be over. Every time the MC came back to the 1970s, I felt in my body the dread she did knowing she’d be sent back into the past soon. Her conflicting emotions over keeping her ancestor alive, knowing all the cruelty he was capable of, was so visceral to me. She was a Black woman from the 1970s, and was forced to work among slaves and be punished for nothing, just like she witnessed happening to the other enslaved people, while also having a special relationship with her ancestor and the plantation’s master, ultimately making her complicit in some of his evil acts. Her husband’s time in the past complicates things further, and both of them have the physical and emotional scars of existing in the past. The way they describe the softness of the present was haunting to me. I’d say this book is more lit fic than sci fi, the MC travels in time, but there’s really no discussion of how. This book was the epitome for me of the understanding that going to the past wouldn’t be some historical fiction romp - it would be a horror story.