I wanted to love this, and the premise seemed to tackle a lot of issues I care about and think are important. Unfortunately the execution fell a little flat for me only because I think it tried to do too much — there were so many narrators and so much time lapsed throughout the entire book. I found myself enjoying each individual narrator (except Juba) but would hate when it switched back to the collective The Children (who by the end were no longer children). Because we were so focused on Thula, I would’ve much preferred we switch back to her for those times… especially since we were reading her letters much of those chapters anyway. 

And while I liked getting to know these characters over a long time, I feel like we sacrificed a lot of the actual details and struggles (and wins, even if lesser in number) in order to cover such an expansive time frame. We’d gloss over things that seemed important and things that obviously were important because they kept being talked about years later. 

Lastly, I’ll just warn that this book is bleak, and not necessarily hopeful. All of the content you expect to be in here is — the harm of chemicals and big oil on human health and the environment; colonialism; police brutality; etc. However, there’s also a lot of other mentions of things that are not ever addressed (sexual harassment, rape, gender roles, homophobia, etc) — I *think* they’re just mentioned because they’re real life and those issues don’t stop just because there are bigger issues affecting you as well. But for those to be mentioned and never reckoned with didn’t leave a great taste in my mouth when looking back on the book as a whole. 

I think I just expected this book to be focused on the environmental degradation, with the public health and colonialism being inseparable from the problem. Instead, the main fight because against all that Big Oil stood for, and the environmental effects were pushed to the very back burner. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad book by any means, but rather that I didn’t get out of it what I expected to.