32. The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois

Honoree Fanonne Jeffers. 2021.

This is another huge novel over 800 pages and almost 30 hours of listening.  It was not what I was expecting with the title.  It turned out to be my favorite genre of book--the intergenerational story, although this is not told in a sequential timeline, making it sometimes hard to piece together. It was like a feminist, modern Roots, with rich character development.  Of course, no story of Black women in the States can be free of the brutality of sexual assault in the context of slavery and its legacy.  Men's experience of slavery, both Black and white are depicted in its rawness, too, but more as experienced vicariously through the eyes of the women characters who lived with these experiences indirectly.  So much of this book is phenomenal.  Its depictions of racism and misogyny were interwoven into the narrative without pause.  The lasting effects of child sex abuse and the complexity of its impact on family dynamics is expertly portrayed here, as is the narratives around how those unresolved traumas play out in different ways from addiction to over-achievement. 

There were sections that I felt could have been skipped or edited to be more concise since there were parts where I lost track of the story and even when I went back and situated it felt like it wasn't so much that I wasn't following it so much as that it was extraneous.  But even with this fault, it is well worth the read.

Recommend.

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