This was a really deeply thoughtful biography; Perry manages to balance her personal investments in telling Hansberry's life story alongside Hansberry's actual life, and does so much work to draw out what is radical in her work. I found it really compelling, and a very easy and accessible read, even for people who are unfamiliar with Hansberry's work or maybe only have hear of Raisin in the Sun. It definitely made me want to look at her work more closely. The chapters about her friendship with James Baldwin and Nina Simone both were so powerful, and the connections made between her work and that of Baldwin were both so powerful.

Sometimes Perry seems too into her role as not!biographer, in resisting speculation in particular earlier in the book, and then seems to give that up fairly easily later in the book; frankly I'm fine with the latter, but I wish she toned down the former, if only because it disrupts the narrative a little bit. In some ways I appreciate how she draws attention to certain practices of biographers that often go unnoticed, but I think just committing--speculating on her pain is frankly not that different from speculating on her relationships, and I think it's fine to acknowledge that! But that was not enough to really distract me from the power of this book wholly, and I really strongly recommend it.