Interesting stories brought about by author’s research into her family.

“Long before I learned how many reasons I had to worry about losing my mind, I worried about losing it.”

“Over the course of our lives, in our own mirrors, we encounter many people who came before us. The past and present blur in our very being; the divide between living and dead becomes porous. “I am the family face,” the poet Thomas Hardy wrote. “Flesh perishes, I live on.”

…”creativity and craziness go together,” because “if you’re just plain crazy without being able to sing or dance or write good poems, no one is going to want to have babies with you. Your genes will fall by the wayside.”

“The goal, she says, is not salvation but the removal of confusion, the return of connection and clarity. We can see more clearly where we need to go, how we may best live, if we know precisely, in our bones, who and where we came from.”

Thank you to NetGalley for a copy of this eBook in exchange for an honest review. Being someone who is interested in genealogy, I really liked this book. It was interesting and has some great points about genetic genealogy. Some of the information was not new to me but it was still something that kept my interest.

Not quite what I expected when I picked up this book... The stories of her family were interesting, but then devolved into odd territory.

I wasn’t familiar with Maud Newton until I saw her on a panel back in October. She was so likable, and the passage she read from this book was totally intriguing. This is a memoir, but also a thorough look at ancestry and research in general. Interesting, but very dry at times. I preferred the personal narrative to the scientific bits simply because the writing flowed more easily.

DNF about 20%

I loved the family story, but don't have much interest in the story of geaneology. I can't even spell geaneology.

Wow, this has a LOT going on! Part investigating the author's own family tree, which was full of challenging topics like mental illness, former slaveholding, etc. Part an examination of DNA testing and genealogical research and what it can and cannot tell us. Part memoir of her own life. And, unexpectedly for me, part investigation of ancestor veneration. Which at first I thought sounded kind of crazy, but then I spent some time thinking about what it might mean translated through me, my experiences and my own beliefs, and I decided there was something positive there for me as well. Really interesting and well-written and all-around fun to read.

2.5 stars

This is interesting, although I did find it slow going at times. It’s about Newton’s explorations with family history, genetic testing, and genealogy. She also deals with the history of British-Americans like herself, and how it was reflected in individual members of her clan. In her study of family history, she came across a lot of racism, and she writes extensively about coming to terms with that.

I most appreciated the personal parts of her story. There’s some vivid family history here, and she writes about how family patterns were repeated in her own life. She also throws in a lot of information about cultural approaches to genetics, and sometimes these drag a bit. I often felt like she was distancing herself from the more personal material, and, as a reader, I felt distanced as well.

In the last few chapters, she writes about ancestor worship, as it’s practiced in many other cultures. She herself tried some formal methods of getting in touch with ancestors and healing ancestral wounds. The writing is dispassionate, clear, and thorough.

This was an excellent book and I would gladly read more of Maud Newton's work. She writes beautifully and brings a lot of honesty and insight to the topic of genealogy and family history research. I particularly loved the way she reckoned with her family's history of racism without (as Roxane Gay put it) "explaining it away" as so many of us do.