This was my first foray into the world of audiobooks. I will add my review of the audiobook to the bottom of this review.
This is a gorgeous book about very not beautiful things. When it started popping up on lost of “best of” and award lists, I knew that I needed to check it out.
Ward beautifully blends rough reality with fantastic magical realism. Flipping between three different perspectives (one of which is a ghost), she takes a look at all angles of a family in crisis. She questions what it means to be a person as well as being a black family in the modern day south. Her use of words is incredibly powerful and had me blown away many times.
I had mixed feelings about the audiobook. The guy playing Jojo was amazing. I could listen to him talk forever. He perfectly embodied the character. The woman playing Leonie, on the other hand, was very hard to listen to. Everything was very dramatic and didn’t seem to match the character Ward had created. Plus, she talks so incredibly slowly. I had to turn up the speed of her sections just to get through them. This, I believe, is a testament to how well written the book is, seeing as a bad narrator didn’t turn me off. Ward’s writing shines through and stands on its own.
SequinBooks 