I really, really enjoyed this.

This book is a half prose half epistolary novel, which I really loved! I thought the letters were a really interesting narrative device and I really liked how they worked throughout the novel.

This book echos James Baldwin’s “If Beale Street Could Talk,” and from what I can tell does so beautifully. I admittedly haven’t read the novel but I did see the film and I thought that this story was an amazing homage to it.

I really liked the multiple perspectives in this novel as well, it allowed you to really empathize with all of the characters, even though I didn’t necessarily agree with all of their choices. But getting the 3 POVs allowed me to at least understand where they were coming from. Plus, the writing is gorgeous.

There were very few things I didn’t like. There’s a scene where a character pressures another character into unprotected sex. And while I understand this choice in a narrative context, it’s just something that personally really irritates me so I didn’t enjoy reading about it.

But over all, a really intricate reckoning with incarceration, marriage, and the relationship between two individuals—and how those things impact Roy and Celestial.