A review by aromanticreadsromance
Tangleroot by Kalela Williams

challenging emotional informative reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
This was a solid debut! You could really tell that Kalela Williams is a historian. Noni is such a well-developed and real/relatable main character, a face of teenage angst and rebelliousness. I could understand her resentment against her parents (mainly her mom) for moving her from New England to small town Virginia (with a very ugly past and present) over the summer and THEN forcing her to withdraw from Boston University in the fall and enroll in a VA community college instead. The lack of agency you experience as a teenager and young adult feels so unfair when you want to make your own choices and mistakes. I can't tell you how angry it made me as a teenager to constantly be told, "I know what's best for you" (which translates to, "you don't know what's best for you" or "I know you better than you know yourself"). UGH. So frustrating!!

This book grapples with the lingering effects of slavery in the South. Noni encounters so many racist white people (who really know how to "disguise" their racism in backhanded, intentional ways). It shows how harmful denying history/our past is.

The book really speeds up at the 75 percent mark. Like seriously, so much is revealed in that last 25 percent, it was almost overwhelming. I imagine that's how Noni felt when she made the same discoveries, but I did have a hard time keeping up, especially since I was listening to the audio. I'm still not sure I got everything that happened.  I really liked the narrator, but I will say that listening to JUST the audio was challenging. I had trouble keeping track of all the minor side characters (sometimes I was like, "why don't we like this person again?"). I feel like doing a tandem read with the physical/digital would have been helpful and less confusing, especially when reading journal entries from the past or hearing flashbacks.

I want to share my (spoiler-free) favorite quotes from the book (I'm quoting an ARC, so it's subject to change, and as I am quoting from the audio, the punctuation might be off. Emphasis is my own!):

It didn't feel fair. White plantation girls got such a good rap. It's like they were silk-clad myths, hustling through the halls of history. They were portrayed with no power or agency, as if white womanhood was slavery light, or there was some fabricated sisterhood between white women and Black servants, of gossip and giggles during hair brushing and corset lacing. Worse, there was a merging of those two untruths, that Black and white women were sisters striding together for freedom from the patriarchy. When our patriarchies were separate and unequal. ... Saying a slave holder was a product of their time implied there was only one way to be, that the year we were born fixed us in some snow globe of perception. But people were as prismatic as glitter, falling differently every time you shook the glass. ... There might have been a hundred ways to be a product of one's time. There must be still.

And two, I thought of the barren flowerbed that once held Robert E. Lee riding through an intended forever of all we raise high on pedestals. There are monuments poured from metals or carved from marble or chiseled into mountains. There are the simpler monuments dedicated to lives on earth, like the one I knelt in front of. And there are the monuments we create from nothing but the air of our imaginations, when we shape the truth of history into a fable. Eras become tales with a story arc. History becomes a story that places the reader at some contrived resolution, the way even the most sobering of museums deposit guests at the gift shop.

Ugh so, so good!!! We can't defend our slave holding ancestors by saying they were "products of their time." Because that implies that during their time, slavery was okay just because it was "legal." I just thought the writing in these paragraphs was beautiful.

My biggest gripe is that there is apparently an Author's Note in the digital book, but it's not there in the audio format (unless I missed it, but I don't think I did, since I tried searching both the beginning and end of the recording and... nothing). At first, I just thought there wasn't an Author's Note but found out through other early reviews that there is. This might be fixed in the final audio version (I hope Kalela Williams herself narrates it). But it makes me sad I couldn't experience it for myself, since I was/am so curious about the research and background that went into this book!

Thank you to Macmillan Audio for the advanced copy of this book!
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