Honestly I liked this book more than I expected. It is indeed very disturbing and I am also unsure about the violence that is depicted in the book. To me, showing violence can serve a purpose but it needs to be carefully done. And I‘m not sure that that was the case here. It was very disturbing indeed and all the male characters were despicable.

To me, the last chapter of the book really redeemed it and tied everything together. To me it is a book about trauma and about the inability of everyone involved to deal when a traumatized person is acting out. We see that Yong-Hye is indeed traumatized from her childhood, and this grows more and more as everyone involved does not respect her will. All the while there is no one who actually listens to her. No one is equipped to deal with her, some people (like her sister) are well-meaning but also very overwhelmed. And I thought to myself, how would I react when someone is behaving in a way that I don‘t understand? I really don‘t know. The book left me with a lot of questions and an uneasy feeling, which actually I’m not mad about.

I finished this book within a few days. I couldn‘t stop to read it, despite how horrifying it was. I believe it is a very special book. The book is about the civil rights movement and the life of Anne Moody during that time. The book shows how white people murdered and murdered and murdered black people. It‘s genuinely horrifying to read. The descriptions in the book are just so detailed and so clear that all this horror becomes very real.

I think what sets this book apart is that it is written in a very plain and real way. It has a lot of ups and downs, contradictions and difficult emotions. One page Anne Moody has a very sweet and heartwarming moment, and then the next page, the most horrifying stuff happens. I think that is the big strength of the book - it‘s simply real life. Reading all of these day-to-day situations together gave me a much better understanding into this time I would say.

The book is really not philosophical or tries to construct a huge narrative. And I appreciate it a lot that the book does not go for some inspirational convenient narrative. It is the book of someone who has experienced cruelty beyond words, and who is disillusioned about the world that they life in.

„I sat on the grass and listened to the speakers, to discover we had "dreamers" instead of leaders leading us. Just about every one of them stood up there dreaming. Martin Luther King went on and on talking about his dream. I sat there thinking that in Canton we never had time to sleep, much less dream.“

Sooo I‘d say my favorite thing for sure was the plot and to learn about the history. The three stories were really nicely coupled, everything felt very natural and it really expanded my horizon - I learned a lot!

The reason that I „only“ give 4 stars is that the characters never came fully alive to me. I wouldn‘t say that they were flat, just that the focus of the book was clearly on the story and not that much on the characters. And for me, to really immerse myself in a world, I need characters that suck me in, and that was missing for me here.