Maud Newton attempts something in this book that many white people aren’t willing to do: to face our often ugly ancestral histories.

Newton’s personal stories carry the reader through the book, however they ran the risk of becoming repetitive without accumulating significance for a couple hundred more pages. At first this slightly irritated me, but as the book drew to a close I can see this as a repeated revisiting, a form of ancestral veneration in itself. As Newton revisits various stories in her ancestry, she reconciles with them in various contexts,  eventually unearthing greater truths about them and herself.

While some of the more scientific chapters ran a bit drier than I would have liked, there was something interesting at every point in her narrative.

I especially appreciated many of Newton’s later chapters, sharing her methods of reconciling with her ancestors and their influences—seen and unseen—over her.