Right off the bat, I received a copy of this book through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program, and I'm grateful to the publisher for the opportunity to read this book. 

These essays for the most part felt somewhat... unfinished to me? Not that I need every essay to have a tidy conclusion, but each essay felt like it was such a surface take on what are often larger issues; the colorism essay, for example, really failed to identify the way that colorism has serious consequences (including much higher rates of arrest and incarceration for darker-skinned Black people,) and while her essay about her struggles with her older son's autism and (maybe?) schizophrenia acknowledges the violence that disabled Black people especially experience at the hands of police, it also came off as fairly ableist. (I would say actually that most of her writing about her autistic son is fairly ableist, from saying he was "robbed" of his childhood by his autism to some descriptions of forcing him to endure overstimulating situations. I'll leave further commentary on it to Black autistic folks, but it made me pretty uncomfortable.) 

I don't need every single essay to be explanatory or like particularly revealing, but so many of these just felt super surface. There were also some writing choices that made me uncomfortable (the aforementioned ableism, her choice to continually use food words to describe the skin of other Black people,) and the essays about her affair, while I think they were meant to show growth, just kind of come across as contradictory. 

I had some high hopes about this, but ultimately it just fell flat for me.