Reviews of favorite books

Fiction: The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow

4/20/2026

Time-travel stories aren’t my usual fare, yet I enjoyed The Everlasting. Three main characters drive the narrative: war-scarred veteran and historian Owen Mallory; female knight and legend Sir Una Everlasting; and War Minister Vivian Rolfe, who sends Owen back in time to record Una’s legendary death for posterity.
The book starts with a recounting of Una Everlasting becoming the queen’s champion, told as a fairy tale. Then we meet Owen, who receives (in the mail) the lost book of Una Everlasting legends that past historians seem to reference. When another historian barges into his office, he bolts with the precious book: [I] ran for it, like the coward I always was and would always be.

Owen has a wonderfully self-effacing sense of humor in the face of very real trauma: “I had never flourished in a crisis. I was one of God’s natural ditherers, much given to the wringing of hands and the writing of unhelpful lists. Since the war, I had added fits of weeping and melancholic stupors, and every now and then a wave of confused and violent memory that left me curled in a corner, shaking.”

Vivian Rolfe is tough and ruthless. She steals, then returns, the precious book to Owen—but now all the pages are blank.
“Why,” I asked, swallowing, “are they blank?”
She leaned over the desk, smiling peacefully. Beneath the tang of cigarette smoke, I smelled something sweet and a little familiar, like summer flowers. “Because you haven’t written them yet,” she said, and then she stabbed the letter opener through the back of my left hand.

Owen is transported back in time to an ancient forest, specifically to an ancient yew tree, which plays an important role in the story and in Owen’s life: There was the old tree, my tree—the one I had run to as a boy, which had been my castle, my refuge, my only-good-place—though it had been cut down years ago.

Owen idolizes Una Everlasting, but she is quite different than he expects. Instead of boldly commencing on her final quest to find the Holy Grail and slay the last dragon, she’s hiding the yew forest, contemplating suicide. She both loves and hates the queen she serves, who will die without the Holy Grail. She is a woman scarred by countless battles.
Owen writes of her: You hardly seemed to notice the cold or the terrain or the long days in the saddle. It didn’t strike me as toughness so much as an odd divide between you and your own flesh. As if your body was merely something you owned, like a sharp knife or a good pair of boots, which you might use hard and tend only when it showed signs of weakening.

It is up to Owen to ensure Una lives up to her legend and completes her quest. Throughout their adventures, he glosses actual events in the book he writes to make them match the legends he remembers.

The first 111 pages of the book, comprising “The First Death of Una Everlasting,” are told entirely from Owen’s viewpoint. In “The Second Death of Una Everlasting,” we get a similar story from Una’s point of view. When Owen makes physical contact, she responds:
A shudder wracked me from skull to spine, and I knew suddenly how it would be with you. Most of my lovers—camp followers and soldiers, crofters’ daughters and the idle sons of lords—had wanted only to take or be taken; they came to me warily or arrogantly, shy or swaggering, as to a caged wolf. But you—oh, you would come to me on your knees, as to a king, and you would give and give.
I was leaning down to you, ready to let you, when you looked up from my palm. You met my eyes—and flinched.

At the end of the “Second Death,” Vivian Rolfe forces Owen to add an addendum to the legend—which significantly changes the present. Though he didn’t before, now Owen remembers journeying to the past—multiple times.

The book explores themes of cowardice and survival. At one point, learning that his friend’s lover has been imprisoned, Owen says “Love makes cowards of us all.”
But when he visits his drunkard father, his understanding shifts:
What happiness my father might have had, he’d sacrificed for me . . . As you had sacrificed yourself, over and over, for your queen.
I thought, despairing, that love didn’t make cowards of us, after all; it made heroes, and heroes didn’t usually survive.

The book also underscores the inherent instability of oppression: Because no throne is held easily, or for long; because a nation is a story we tell about ourselves, and stories change, if you let them. Because where there is power, someone will oppose it.

“The Third Death of Una Everlasting” is 25 pages of Owen and Una falling in love and trying to escape the endless cycle of her legendary death. They use “The Fourth Death of Una Everlasting” to try to change the narrative. Somewhere around the third or fourth iteration, I wasn't sure I could finish the book. It was so heartbreaking to watch them find and lose each other again and again.
The “Last Death of Una Everlasting” was worth the journey. Everything that went before comes together in the final 16 pages of the book in a way that makes every single word resonate from the preceding chapters. I won’t spoil the ending, but I will say it was absolutely satisfying in the best way possible.
Writing instructors often say the ending can make or break a novel—the exquisite ending of The Everlasting made this novel a powerful and rewarding reading experience.

Read other socially relevant fantasy: Shit Cassandra Saw,  Kissing the Witch,  Not a Princess,
The Bruising of Qilwa,  The Dragon’s Path (The Dagger and the Coin series),  Pledging Season
Nonfiction on the political power of story: Stories are Weapons,  A Paradise Built in Hell

Nonfiction: The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman

4/17/2026

The Genius of Birds provides a fascinating exploration of the astounding ways our feathered cousins have adapted to our world.
The author investigates how birds can anticipate storms from far away; how they learn and imitate songs; how they remember where they’ve hidden seeds and how they can remember where they put them months later "over hundreds of square miles.”
Research revels that bird’s brains function similarly to human’s in the areas activated for learning birdsong or speech. One scientist said: “mammalian brains are likes PCs…while bird brains are like Apples. The processing is different, but the output is similar.”

“Both birds and humans use similar brain circuits to produce their vocalizations.” Young birds’ “early efforts [at singing] are known as subsong, and they’re just like a baby’s babbling—noisy variable, exploratory. It’s motor ‘play,’ which helps both birds and infants learn to control the muscles required for song and speech.”

Birdsong often functions as a language. Chickadees, for example, “use their calls to convey their location to another bird or to twitter news of a tasty treat; others, to warn of predators—both the type of beast and the magnitude of its threat. … So reliable are the chickadees’ vocalizations that other species heed their warnings.”

Because songbirds pass their songs down through the generations, they can develop regional dialects. I witnessed this in eastern Tennessee, where the eastern mourning doves had an ‘accent” compared to the ones near St. Louis: a much shorter second syllable “coo-AHHH” and missing the last syllable of “coo, coo, coo.”

One of my favorite stories was of clever birds in the United Kingdom (great and blue tits) who learned to peel the cardboard caps off glass milk bottles left on peoples’ stoops and drink the cream off the top. They first learned this trick in “1921 in the town of Swaythling; by 1949, the behavior had been noted in hundreds of localities throughout England, Wales, and Ireland.”

Corvids (crows, jays, magpies, ravens, and rooks) are one of the most clever bird species.
  Crows learned to use a busy crosswalk in Japan to crack nuts by dropping them in front of passing cars, then retrieving them when the light changed.
  Scientists also documented a crow using tricks from Aesop’s fable, The Crow & the Pitcher, to get tasty treats in a variety of experiments by dropping stones into a water-filled tube.

In Oregon, a pair of ravens defended their nestlings from intruding researchers by tossing rocks at the researchers. “A rock that struck a researcher in the leg [had been] pulled out of the ground, where it had been partially buried.”

Researchers know that blue jays can “count to at least five. And they can neatly mimic the piercing cry of a red-shouldered hawk, kee-ah, kee-ah, which they often do, perhaps to fool other birds into believing there’s a raptor in the vicinity, leaving more nuts for the taking."
A favorite trick of the scrub jay "is to rob a cat of its food by giving its tail a vigorous peck and when the cat turns to retaliate, to jump for the prize and make off with shrieks of exaltation.”

A New Caledonian crow named 007 was able to figure out a complex, eight-stage puzzle. These brainy crows hail from an island east of Australia, where crows in different parts of the islands have different tool-making traditions, all aimed at extracting nutrient-dense grubs from tree wood.

There are other crows in similar environments that haven’t learned to use tools to access grubs. Scientists believe the relative isolation from predators in New Caledonia gave these crows “the time and ease of mind to tinker with sticks and barbed leaves, to poke and probe, to bite and tear, and then probe again, without looking up. Freedom from threats may also have allowed for the evolution of a more leisurely childhood, in which young crows under the watch of their parents could dabble safely in toolmaking, refining their skills over a long period of time without starving in the process.”

Kea parrots in New Zealand are mischievous tricksters, “destructive hoodlums that go around in juvenile gags trashing things, deconstructing windshield wipers and the vinyl trim on cars, as well as campers’ tents and backpacks, rain gutters, and outdoor furniture. The kea’s playfulness with objects may allow them develop a “toolkit” of behaviors for dealing with novel situations or unexpected foraging conditions.”

Keas play catch, roll snowballs to each other, and like to roughhouse: “The partners parry and duel with their beaks, ducking, thrusting, ducking again. They tussle, lock bills, bite, push with their feet, roll onto their backs while squealing and waving their feet, and stand on each other’s stomachs.”
But these unique alpine parrots are losing their habitat due to the climate crisis and rising temperatures. “Because a mountain is like a pyramid, there’s less area for habitat available as [climate-stressed species] move up the mountain. They’re being squeezed both by temperatures and for space.”

Birds also have highly evolved social skills for communal living: “They breed on colonies, bathe in groups, roost in congregations, forage in flocks. They eavesdrop. They argue, they cheat, they deceive and manipulate. … They display a strong sense of fairness. They give gifts. They play keep-away and tug-of-war with twigs, strands of Spanish mass, bits of gauze. They pilfer from their neighbors. They warn their young away from strangers. They tease, they share. They cultivate social networks. They vie for status. They kiss to console one another. … They summon witnesses to the death of a peer, they may even grieve.”

One of the most interesting social groupings are the extended families among pied babblers: “Family groups are dominated by a single breeding pair, along with several other adults that don’t [breed]; all the adults in the group dote on the young, helping to brood, feed, and care for them.” Adults help train fledglings, who “blackmail adults into feeding them at higher rates by venturing into riskier open locations.”

The author notes that roughly 80% of bird species live in “socially monogamous” pairs who stay with the same partner at least through breeding season. But this doesn’t equate with genetic monogamy. “ In any given nest, up to 70% of chicks are not sired by the male caring for them. Pair-bonded birds may be socially monogamous. But they’re rarely sexually (or therefore genetically) monogamous.”
The author’s language suggests males are "tricked" into raising bastard nestlings by sneaky females, but this relies on the patriarchal assumption that genetic paternity matters to male birds. It’s probable that male-bird parents, like the nonbreeding adults among pied babblers, know the young aren’t necessarily sired by their own sperm and simply don’t care.

Bird nests are a highly visible example of bird genius.
One of the most elaborate and artistic constructions are made by the bowerbirds of Australia and New Guinea.
They construct a tunnel-like bower for mating, and decorate the courtyard and avenue leading to the bower with colorful objects meant to attract and impress females.

Different species of bowerbirds favor specific color combinations: satin bowerbirds prefer blue and silvery, shiny objects; Vogelkop bowerbirds decorate their designs with brightly colored orchid blossoms, fruit, and iridescent beetle wings; great bowerbirds use a monochromatic display often incorporating white stones, bleached bones, and snail shells.
It takes about seven years for male bowerbirds to learn the craft, often by helping senior males, although some juvenile satin bowerbird hoodlums were caught stealing by a robot decoy bird.

When a female arrives at a bower, the males dance. “Some males are attentive. If a female seems alarmed, they will rein in their display, tempering their wing flipping and giving her some distance. Other males are oblivious. The responsive dudes, it turns out, are those that secure the most matings.”
Visual acuity may contribute to the artistic displays of bowerbirds. While the cone cells in human eyes see three colors, birds can see four (including ultraviolet). “Moreover, in each bird’s cone cell is a drop of colored oil that enhances its ability top detect differences between similar colors.”

In terms of evolution, the tastes of female bowerbirds encourage male artistry: only the most attractive bowers and attentive male dancers attract mates. “The beauty of the bower is shaped by the perception of the female. …her mind shapes male display; she is the architect of the male bird’s artistic creation and the brains required to achieve it.”
Throughout the book , the author demonstrates how evolution both fosters innovation and selects for cognitive growth to exploit those innovations. Whether it’s tool use, replicating precise songs, or navigating the complex social relationships of a large group, activities that require mental processing create evolutionary pressure towards greater cognition, creating smarter birds.

House sparrows are known for their adaptability, which has allowed them to co-exist with humans.
In Normal, Illinois, “two ecologists watched house sparrows working their way along a line of parked cars in a parking lot, gleaning insects trapped in the radiators. …In some cities, you can find cigarette butts in sparrow nests, which effectively function as a parasite repellent.”

The author quotes Leon Megginson of the importance of adaptability: “It’s not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent . . . It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
Yet: “The wisdom is that humanity is driving roughly half of all known life to extinction, including one in four species of birds.” Most of these are specialist birds, but even sparrow numbers are declining.

The Genius of Birds is a fabulous exploration of birds’ intelligence and creativity, with many more inspiring stories than the few I've highlighted. And yet we still have much to learn about these fascinating creatures. The author closes with a quote by Albert Einstein:
“As a human being, one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists.”

Read more about bird and animal intelligence: Being a Bird, Animal Emotions,
An Immense World, The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog,
If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal, Sounds Wild and Broken

Nonfiction: The Afterlife of Malcolm X by Mark Whitaker

4/10/2026

The Afterlife of Malcolm X: An Outcast Turned Icon’s Enduring Impact on America is a must-read for anyone interested in American history.
The book starts with Malcolm X’s horrific assassination and the botched investigation afterwards that railroaded two innocent men.
Defiant, well-spoken, and intellectually ahead of his time, Malcolm attributed his philosophical clarity to his Muslim faith. Many Black Americans hid their true feelings from whites to avoid conflict and try to assimilate into American culture.
Not Malcolm. “By my being Muslim,” he said, “I’m not interested in being American, because America has never been interested in me.”

Physically, Malcolm cut a "mesmerizing figure in the dark suits that cloaked his tall, slender physique, and the scholar’s glasses that framed the handsome face with its fringe of reddish hair, high mocha cheekbones, and intense light eyes.”
A reporter who knew him well also described his physical presence: “He was a tall, coppery man, six-foot-three and long muscled, with close-cut hair, cool gray-green eyes, and the straight-up bearing of a soldier, or a priest.”

The book traces the different ways Malcolm was idolized (or demonized) in American culture in the decades after his death. A wide array of people drew inspiration from Malcolm’s words and life, and the book highlights these groundbreaking people and movements:

Alex Haley, who helped write Malcolm’s best-selling autobiography;
The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense
Muhammad Ali
the Black Arts Movement
rappers Public Enemy, KRS-One, and Tupac Shakur
director Spike Lee
President Barack Obama
Black Lives Matter

The author explores the personal background of each person featured in the book and how their lives intersected and reflected Malcolm’s message, for example:

Civil-rights activist Stokely Carmichael listened to Malcolm’s speeches on the streets of Harlem as a high school student. At Howard university, he joined an activist group, and asked Malcolm to debate a mainstream integrationist speaker. He was inspired by Malcom’s forceful speaking style, which he later adapted: “The dramatic African tradition of the spoken word” which required the speaker to be “highly skilled in poetic and rhetorical terms, and flawless in crowd psychology. To hold, inspire, and work their audience, they had to be powerfully persuasive and quick-witted and sure-footed.”

Seeing Malcolm in person transformed him into an activist: “What Malcolm demonstrated that night … was the raw power, the visceral potency, of the grip our unarticulated collective blackness held over us.”

Basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was also galvanized by Malcolm’s message: “I was riveted by Malcolm’s intimate story of how he came to realize he’d been the victim of institutional racism, which had imprisoned him long before he’d landed in an actual prison. That’s how I felt: imprisoned by an image of who I was supposed to be.”
He had experienced racism from his coaches and society at large. Embracing Malcolm’s philosophy helped him forge his own path in the world.

Olympic athlete John Carlos grew up listening to Malcolm on local radio in New York. He noted the difference between Malcolm and other civil rights leaders: “Malcolm wasn't speaking to the best angels of our nature. He was speaking to the distance we had to travel if we are going to be seen and respected as human beings, not animals, servants or slaves.”

Inspired by Malcolm, he and fellow elite athletes staged a boycott of the Mexico Olympics unless racially oppressive South Africa and Rhodesia were barred from the games. The Olympic Committee agreed to this demand. At the event, Carlos and his fellow American medalist Tommie Smith raised their fists on the medal podium to protest the continued oppression of blacks in the US and Africans abroad.
Carlos later said of his life-long activism: “Seize your moment in time. The only true regrets in life come from inaction.”

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas attributes his stance against affirmative action to Malcolm’s message of self-reliance and the “false promise of integration.” Thomas was also heavily influenced by the grandfather who raised him to be stoic and self-disciplined, a self-made man who disdained welfare. Says Thomas: “I don’t care how educated you are, how good you are at what you do—you’ll never have the same contacts or opportunities, you’ll never be seen as equal to whites.” He supports Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) as a better choice for Black students than integration at white-majority institutions.

Two threads weave through the entire book: Malcolm’s relationship with the Nation of Islam (NOI), and the mystery of who orchestrated his assassination.

Malcolm initially credited Elijah Muhammad, founder of NOI, with giving his life direction during his incarceration (a harsh ten-year sentence for breaking and entering). Malcolm’s older siblings had converted and he also embraced Muhammad’s teachings, writing him letters and traveling to Chicago to meet him upon his release. Malcolm was later appointed leader of the Harlem mosque and became the Nation’s spokesperson.
Their relationship soured when Malcolm learned Elijah Muhammad had sex with young women of the faith.

On March 8, 1964, Malcolm officially severed ties with Elijah Muhammad, forming his own organization.

A bitter fight over the home Elijah Muhammad had gifted Malcolm and his young family followed. The following month, Malcolm flew to Mecca and embraced traditional Islamic faith. Upon his return, he began publicizing Elijah Muhammad’s predatory sexual behavior. That February, his home was fire-bombed, the family was evicted, and Malcolm received death threats from the Nation of Islam.
During his speech at Barnard College on February 18, 1965, Malcolm said, “I would rather be dead than have somebody deprive me of my rights.”
Three days later, he was assassinated in front of his family and four hundred supporters.

One shooter, Thomas Hagen of New Jersey, was caught and beaten by the crowd, but the other two gunmen escaped. Hagen would later confess that he was hired to assassinate Malcolm, but refused to name other conspirators. Two local men from the Nation of Islam were charged and convicted of the murder (along with Hagen).
A journalist named Peter Goldman, a friend of Malcolm and his family, publicized irregularities in the court case. He and other journalists learned the FBI withheld information to protect informants within NOI. They also uncovered evidence a mosque in New Jersey was the source of the assassination plot, but it was more than twenty years after their imprisonment that the two innocent local men were finally exonerated.

The Afterlife of Malcolm X: An Outcast Turned Icon’s Enduring Impact on America provides an in-depth, nuanced account of Malcolm X’s life and legacy written in an engaging style. Highly recommended.

Read other books on US racism: How to be an Anti-Racist, Broken Heart of America
Read fiction exploring prejudice: So Many Beginnings, The Dragon’s Path (The Dagger and the Coin series),
City of Stairs (Divine Cities Trilogy), The Word for World is Forest, A Closed and Common Orbit,
The Witch’s Heart, The Remarkable Retirement of Edna Fischer, Remnant Population,
Pledging Season, The Bone Marrow Thieves, Light from Uncommon Stars, The Bruising of Qilwa

Fiction: So Many Beginnings by Bethany C. Morrow

4/3/2026

Realistic multidimensional characters, unexpected yet plausible plot turns, and a fearless portrayal of Black life during the Civil War era make So Many Beginnings an exceptional reading experience.
Marketed as a reimagining of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, the novel far exceeds its original inspiration in scope and authenticity.
This storyline follows the March family restarting with their lives as newly emancipated slaves and living in Freedpeople Colony (Roanoke Island Freedmen’s Colony) in North Carolina. It follows the four daughters through various adventures as the young women grow into adulthood and find their way in a world both welcoming and hostile.

The story is accessible to any reader, yet we never forget that we are experiencing the unique lives of Black Americans during the 1860s. The four March girls are similar yet distinct from their counterparts in the original novel.

Meg teaches at the local school, which receives substandard supplies compared to the schools run by white missionaries. She was educated during her tenure as a slave serving as a companion to the plantation owner’s spoiled daughter—essentially a living doll.
When the white daughter got engaged, she blithely informed Meg that she planned to take her along to her new home. Meg was traumatized by this scenario. The war broke out before the selfish daughter could rip Meg away from her own family.

Later, when a white missionary graciously offers to send Amy to study in Boston, where it’s “perfectly safe,” Meg has a visceral reaction:
“For you. Perfectly safe for you in Boston. You’ve no idea what it would be for [a] fourteen-year-old Black child” … [the Missionary proposing to take Amy away from her family conjured up] the same heart-stopping fear [as in Meg’s past], all while seeming so elated and self-satisfied. All while expecting immediate gratitude, because she didn’t know what it felt like to be on the receiving end of those words, and she never would.

Jo (Joanna) is the clarifying voice of the novel, boldly calling out prejudicial attitudes of the time:

the white journalist writing about the Freedpeople’s Colony who only interviews the white Union officers overseeing the project
the well-meaning white missionary who unwittingly inserts herself into the March family’s affairs
the educated northern Blacks who expect emancipated slaves to be universally coarse and uneducated

She writes: The white men credited with … my own Freedpeople Colony at Roanoke … will be legends no matter how [such] colonies turn out, because it is not difficult to imagine heroes who look like all the ones christened before. … What I find curious is the persistent omission of those who by our identity, and because of our heinous oppression, have far grander hopes. Who hopes more for Blacks than we ourselves? … We have no other homes to return to if the grand hope of a colony comes to nothing.
She decides to use her pen to champion the cause of Freedpeople Colony, even knowing it might be in vain: I must, at the back of my mind and to the depth of my spirit, be prepared to have grander hopes than these.

Beth (Bethlehem) is a seamstress, repurposing scavenged bits of cloth into beautiful dresses for her sisters and others (instead of excelling in music like the original book).
Like her counterpart in Alcott’s novel, she is often ill and considered saintly, though not in her own mind: Beth was not indelibly good or impossibly pure the way some needed to think she was … but she was patient.
Despite her calm demeanor, Beth can also be a sharp critic of white privilege.
In conversation with a white missionary on Christian scripture, Beth says:

“It’s difficult to let those who held the scripture hostage and warped it to justify enslavement and treachery stand as authorities on its meaning. I don’t mean to imply that their isn’t a true and certain meaning, but it will rarely be championed by the same people who distorted it in their favor.”

We meet Amy (Amethyst) bemoaning the summer heat: it made her scalp swelter and steam like a pot of crabs.
Amy is bored because she’s forced to stay home to have the idle childhood none of the other members of her family were allowed when enslaved.
She dances to entertain herself, and it is her dance that will become her art (compared to painting in the original novel).
It’s wonderful to watch her transform from an indulged child to an accomplished and generous young woman.

When the novel opens, Lorie (Loren) lives in the Big House, a confiscated mansion. When the March family comes to help celebrate a wedding, he joins Jo observing the dancers, and the two become immediate friends, bantering back and forth, quickly becoming inseparable.
Their friendship is a delight to witness.

But they do disagree at times. Jo is fully committed to Freedpeople’s Colony, however Lorie is suspicious of the Union’s “generosity” providing the land upon which the March’s and other emancipated families built homes (on a provisional basis).
He says: “If it’s up to me, I’ll never spend a night there, in the barracks, or the village. I’ll never accept anything for which the white men can demand my gratitude, when they owe me more than can ever be repaid.”
They continue the argument, and Jo says: “You don’t have to agree with me, but you must know what’s a half measure to you is a first step to me. It is only failure if you stop there.”

Later, Lorie kisses her:
His lips fell gently on hers, and Jo only turned away in time for him to kiss her cheek.
Jo is confused by him romanticizing their friendship: Where she’d been totally free with Lorie before, now she was aware. She would worry from here one, over what she did, and how he might take it.
The eventual resolution of their relationship is natural and completely satisfying—a highlight of the book (much more so than in Alcott's original novel).

Their mother (Mammy) is a woman of faith determined to keep her family together after a lifetime of seeing slave families ripped apart to serve the needs of white masters. When her husband decides to fight for the Union, she tells the girls: “we must go on enjoying the freedom that made him choose [to fight.] We mustn’t feel guilty wen we find ourselves laughing. Even in the old life, we confounded our captors with our spirit, with the joy we made together. Not because we approved of our enslavement, but because we are resilient people. We hide light in the darkest place, and when others think embers extinguished, we know how to breathe them back into life.”

Despite her instincts to hold her girls close, they inevitably grow up and find lives independent of her. Mammy has the closing lines of the book: “Go on, my darlings,” she said, while her daughters were still wrapped around her. “Be free.”

The Author’s Note at the end of the book describing her inspiration for writing the novel is worthy of a book club discussion.
She says when people don’t want to remove statues of “enslavers and brutalizers, it isn’t because they are protecting history. They’re protecting their legends, their mythology, the things they’ve decided to believe or at least repeat [and admire], to the exclusion and misrepresentation of whatever really happened [in] a country with an intentionally racist foundation and a recurring pandemic of state violence against Black Americans."
History is fraught with political agendas: we weren’t taught “history” . . . We were taught propaganda, and it was and has been another dehumanizing campaign in the ongoing march of white supremacy. ... History must be searched out, and the people that myths have omitted or misrepresented restored.”

The Author sees So Many Beginnings as an opportunity “to challenge what we have accepted as history and acknowledge the roles that white supremacy and anti-Blackness play in that conception [and] the mythology we’ve ingested, and which has shaped our national imagination.” It does that and so much more, providing a compelling story and unforgettable characters.
Marketed as a Young Adult novel, the book suffers from none of the melodrama or histrionics that so often plague books for younger audiences, and will be enjoyable to adults.
Sharply written and thoroughly enjoyable, So Many Beginnings is a five-star read. Highly recommended.

Also in the Remixed Classics series: Most Ardently
Read more fiction deftly exploring prejudice: The Bone Marrow Thieves, The Bruising of Qilwa,
A Closed and Common Orbit, Light from Uncommon Stars, Pledging Season, Remnant Population
Read other books on US racism:
How to be an Anti-Racist, Broken Heart of America, The Afterlife of Malcolm X
Read more about political propaganda: Stories are Weapons

Fiction: The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow

Nonfiction: The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman

Nonfiction: The Afterlife of Malcolm X by Mark Whitaker

Fiction: So Many Beginnings by Bethany C. Morrow

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