at no fault of the author, this book was not what i expected it to be (my library app listed it as poetry and while pamela sneed is a poet, this was more or less essays). so i got off on the wrong foot with this one and never quite recovered. at the core of everything was a deeply important story about the aids epidemic and the failure on many levels to save people thus creating the fall out that sneed lived and her involvement in that grief. i'm thankful that she shared so much of herself with us.

however, mixed in between this critical dialogue was a discussion on racism, politics, pop culture that never felt fleshed out. she analyzes king kong's racist roots, the hunger games and parable of the sower as today, the impact on african tourism at the hands of the mini-series roots and marvel's the black panther, cbs hit tv series survivor for its lack of surviving, beyoncé as an exploitive business model, princess diana as a beloved face of a colonial empire, planet of the apes as a refusal to "go back where you came from." it felt like an endless take down of pop culture for the sake of naming as many thing as possible. especially so when her essay history is built off summarizing the plots of other books and films and doing little to create a purposeful connective thread.