This book fell short for me, and as I came to wonder about why this was, I realized that it was not the message—how can you critique someone’s lives experiences and their processing of them? How can you critique someone pointing out truths you’ve ignored or missed? I especially found this book hard to critique/review because I realized that this book wasn’t written for me. It was written for someone just starting out on their racial justice journey. For someone who has not done any work or research into what it’s like to be black in America.

That reason it fell short was the narrative structure and pacing of this book. It seemed...unfocused? At times I wasn’t sure how she chose to organize the chapters and I felt like she could have reordered them for a stronger emotional punch of her personal stories.