The whole time I was reading this book, I felt like I was missing something. Like I was looking at a world through a hazy film, seeing the basic but not the finer details. Something always felt like it was out of reach. Then I looked up some of the references in the book and felt things starting to move into place.
My mistake was reading a book about a country that has a mythology and culture with which I was not familiar. I definitely would have appreciated a little more back story or even a list of referenced mythology that I could refer to so I could better understand the book.

That being said, this is a powerful book about those who are considered outcasts in society, sometimes for just being who they are. It shows the injustices they suffer daily and how they choose to deal with them. And even the dead will rise in protest when the injustice is great enough. It’s about how they find each other against all odds and show each other support and how to love.

I wish that the author has included a reference list of the mythologies/folklore that she is representing in her book. I think it would have made the story that much more powerful if I could have known the cultural significance behind things. I also went into this book expecting it to be a continuous story. What I found was a grouping of different stories with threads that carried over to some but not others. It kind of made things feel disjointed to me at first; not in a negative way, it just contributed to my overall feeling that I was missing something important in the narrative.

I definitely had a lot of feelings while reading this book which was exactly the point. I could not help but cringe at various parts and commiserate with others. And upon finishing, I was struck with the notion that while almost 70 years since the original experiment occurred, things are really not too much different. The problems Griffin highlights are still prevalent today and with the rising popularity of social media and wireless communication, we are able to see these problems instantly and on a global scale. An educated white man goes undercover as a Black man in the Deep South in 1959 to highlight the difference in the Black experience.

This powerful book made me think. A LOT. I wondered what it would be like to repeat the same study a decade later, 2 decades later, or 3 and see how things have changed if at all. What if we did this with a person of Asian decedent in 2020 almost anywhere in the world? Or a person who appeared to be Middle Eastern anytime after 2001? Or a woman of any color? Any person of the LGBT+ community? Would it make people stop and think?

Ok so this is a little bit more of an editorial than my normal book reviews but there’s a good reason for that. This book made me think, made me feel, made me challenge my own biases and perceptions of reality. This is a book that should be required reading so that we are forced to really evaluate ourselves and learn from the mistakes of our collective past.