This was a stressful book as the first chapter opens with a death and I was immediately wishing for different futures for the characters. The main focus here is on intergenerational trauma and all the complexities of family and race, so it’s a tough one to get through but so worth it. 

The story regularly flips between the past and the present so we as the readers can try to piece together the two times and how things came to be, while also allowing for some mystery in the bigger reveals. I would love to reread this one knowing what I know now because there are so many subtle hints the author leaves throughout the plot and the character descriptions that seem so obvious after the fact. 

As much as I appreciated the interrogation of race in this book, I felt uncomfortable that the mixed Latinx/white character seemed to serve as the stand-in for whiteness. Noelle is the only one contending with her whiteness, recognizing the racial violence others have faced, and feeling the blame of the world, but she rarely gets a moment to examine the racial violence that’s been inflicted on herself, which doesn’t seem a deliberate exclusion that was meant to add to the story. I understand, as much as I can, the complexity of being a mixed-race person and dealing with the traumatic and colonial history of whiteness but it didn’t feel like the character’s Latinx identity was considered much at all. I’ll defer to Latinx and mixed-race reviewers on this and seek out how they felt about the authenticity of the character. 

It’s a sad story of loss in more ways than one and all the ways that may show up in our lives, as well as the devastating consequences when the grief and trauma from these losses are not addressed or recognized, or are beaten down. I appreciated the ending and the moments of connection and lightness that the author has managed to intersperse in quite a necessarily dark tale. I also loved reading the acknowledgements and seeing how the author’s own experience as a mother so clearly influenced multiple relationships in the book.