If there's an issue with James Baldwin, it's that I could be content with him writing about the weather, or the cost of popular goods, and it'd still probably feel hypnotic. Though his choice of topics that were important to him might be what drove him to write such stirring, eloquent prose.

Sometimes it's hard for me to write reviews for books that I don't just like, but genuinely find impressive. There aren't a lot of cracks or blemishes to really dig into. One of the main things that surprised me was more due to my own ignorance.

After one of their rough encounters with the police, I actually looked this book up to see what year it took place in, and found it somewhat startling that this book is set in the 70's. I'm not ignorant enough to believe that things were good for black people in America in the 70's, but the struggles seemed barely better than descriptions of America before the Civil Rights Act. While I knew a lot of the data points in the abstract, seeing it laid out in this story made it so much more grimly clear.