I don’t know that I can do this book justice in my review, but I will endeavor to explain why it has stuck with me years after reading it.

As a Black woman in America, there are some things you just know. You know them because your mother and aunties and grandmothers knew them. You know things because society reinforces the lessons taught at home as if it was giving you a test you began studying for right out of the womb. Some thing’s are not so much explained as they are felt and experienced. I knew at 8 that the pain I felt was treated differently than my white friends. I watched my mother advocate for me and even change my doctors when they refused to take serious the concerns we brought up. My father taught me about the Tuskegee Experiment while my mother taught me about the Devil of Gynecology. So I was not completely unprepared for what awaited me in Medical Apartheid.

Still, there is truly no way to be adequately prepared to read of the complete and total disregard for you and your people as human beings. The destruction of the body and mind in the name of cruelty disguised as science. And yet, I would rather know these things in intimate detail than remain ignorant to the suffering we were forced to endure. I will not turn a blind eye because it is “uncomfortable.” I will bear witness in order to honor and remember their pain. And I will use this knowledge to remain aware so when systems try to run this playbook again, I will not be fooled, placated or taken unawares.

So I said all that to say this. Read the book. It is hard and uncomfortable and enraging. But history, which is rarely easy, is always necessary to be understood if we hope for it to remain history and not become our present or future.

This is my second time reading this book. The first time was in 2018. It sounds extremely weird to say but this is one of my top three Karin Slaughter books. That being said, I will never, EVER, lightly recommend this book to anyone.

Karin is a master storyteller. She has a way of conveying emotion that immediately hits you in the diaphragm, claws its way inside, and takes root. She does not shy away from the painful, the hurtful, the horrific. She writes brutality like someone intimately knowledgeable with its touch. She writes trauma like someone who has stared into the face of evil and dared to keep their soul afterwards.

It was harder for me this time to get through this book. There were times where I was silently crying, others where I curled up in my bed, times where I bawled my eyes out, and still more when I felt like the evil portrayed in the book had slithered from the pages to wrap its tentacles around me. I triggered myself a couple of times with this book. It’s a good thing I see my therapist weekly 😆.

All that being said, this was a phenomenal story of family tragedy, fractured bonds, human depravity, and ultimately love in all its many facets. The Carrol family will be one I will never forget. Sam, the dad, broke my heart, but his unwavering dedication to finding his daughter spoke of a deep and abiding unconditional love that Fathers should have for their daughters. Helen, the mom, was a multifaceted woman and I appreciated her deeply. Lydia and Claire were broken in their own ways, reacted to the trauma in their own ways, yet in the end the bond of sisterhood was bent but unbroken.

If you choose to read this book, just know that it is triggering and traumatizing. Yet the human capacity for resilience, forgiveness, and love shines through in the end.