I am not entirely sure what to do with this book. I spent a loooong time with the audiobook. The stories were entertaining. I loved the narrator. Honestly, the narrator is the biggest reason I kept going with the book. Because I can't ignore the fact that this is a book about Black characters dealing with very specific problems that only Black people experienced in Jim Crow America and it's written by a white man. He wrote a whole long spiel about growing up around a diverse group of people from all over the world and it gave him a unique view of the world and that's why he felt like he could write this story and blah blah blah. That's all great, but he is still a white man. He will never know what it's like to be a Black person in the US.

And for that matter, neither will I. I can't critique the accuracy of the author's portrayal of life as a Black person in the US in the late 50's because I don't know what that was like either, and I never will. But I can say that it doesn't sit right with me that he felt he was the person who needed to write this book. And it makes me wonder how many Black people have written similar stories that have been passed over in favor of an already-established white writer.

I didn't give this book a rating because I still don't know how I feel about it, despite finishing it and finding the plot intriguing enough to listen to the whole thing. I am just left feeling conflicted about the whole experience.