White Like Her

More like 3.5 stars, but I can't quite go to 4.

There were two problems I had with this otherwise-wonderful book. The first problem I had was no fault of the author or the book, but the format I chose: as an audiobook the names/relationships were sometimes hard for me to keep straight. I'm very confident that if I'd had access to a physical book there would have been a genealogical chart included, which would have helped me keep track of everyone. As it stands I'm a little unclear on some of the threads of the story, and it did take away a bit from the experience. I highly recommend getting hold of a physical or e-book.

The second problem I had was the way that the author sometimes imagined dialogue and letters between members of her family. It was jarring to have fictional pieces inserted into an otherwise-factual book; after each of these passages I found myself thinking “But you don't know! It could have been completely different than all that!” These fictional passages added zero value to the book and broke the flow of belief I was in when listening - I couldn't just listen and take in the story, I now had to pay extra attention to suss out the truth from the fantasy. And that's a shame because the actual true story is wonderful without anything added.