Black Indian is a memoir of Shonda Buchanan's family, collapsing a personal story with a study of genealogy and migration, reaching for healing of trauma both generational and personal with every page. This text sings with poetic prose as Buchanan illuminates a complex story of her family, and lays alongside it the historic treatment of mixed race people in the US, both generally and specifically the intersection of American Indian and African American. This book is a deep dive, at times it was difficult to keep the nonlinear narrative together and the large cast of people separate. There isn’t really a clear story arc happening here, though in that way it’s real life. I feel honored to have been given the opportunity to journey through this still unfolding story, and I feel like it stretched my nonfiction muscles more than many of the texts I tackled this year.

Don’t miss this one if you’re a big lover of nonfiction. Whether you lean more toward memoir or history, I think you will find a lot to treasure in this book.