Honestly, I had a difficult time with this book. The prose is written in Southern dialect and frequently includes the n-word. I had to slow down to figure out what was being communicated for the first third of the book, and the repeated racial slurs were tough to see again and again. The purpose of the book was clear, and you could see the same patterns repeating with different characters as Jane's life progressed. While this makes a powerful point about how slavery died in name but not in practice, it made it hard to connect to new characters as I knew their fate would not be pleasant. I did enjoy a few passages of Gaines' writing, especially Ned's sermon on the river. In conclusion, while this book is important and uses the lens of one woman's (long) life to show how much has stayed the same from 1863 to 1963, it was not a book that fully connected with me.