The thing about reading an authors back catalog is that whatever it is you fell in love with in their most recent work isn't always there. Or it is, but not in the same way.
I can see the bones of The Changeling and The Ballad of Black Tom here, but also it's its own story and also LaValle is doing different things that felt, at least in the beginning, more like Mat Johnson's Pym. 
But the end, ugh, the end was beautiful.
This wasn't a book to get swept up in, which may be on me for reading it when I wanted to be swept up, and yet I appreciated what LaValle was doing and the way the end almost rewrites the entire book for the reader and reframes it. But also I might have recognized and appreciated it more if it wasn't, you know, January 2021 and we all weren't DEEPLY exhausted.