I am a Ta-Nehisi Coates fan. If there were a t-shirt, I would wear it. So this novel was disappointing to me.

It started out very well. The prose was crisp and the characters seemed to be heading in an interesting direction. Unfortunately, the story fizzled out and though there were a lot of really wonderful ideas I didn't think they cohered. Perhaps I am deficient, but halfway through this novel I felt bored. I had to really push through to the end and even then I never felt a sense of satisfaction. The magical realism was wonderful but it felt undeveloped. The characters suffered but I never felt I knew them.

Slave narratives are rough reads. The kind of pain and suffering one wades into is no small exchange for a reader. So if I'm going to open up to that I need more in return and while some of the ideas in this novel had interesting intellectual implications the force of narrative fell far too flat for me to engage with them.