Trickle-down works — just not in the way the plutocrats would have you think. It works through the countless daily cruelties, microaggressions to monstrous ones, cascading down from each wounded person down to whomever is ever-so-slightly lower on the status ladder, from the weak to the weaker because you can’t lash back up so violence is displaced down to the smaller and more vulnerable. It works because there’s always someone smaller and more vulnerable, all the way down until the lowest bottommost child, and who but Morrison really cares about her anyway? It works by fostering an atmosphere so thick with resentment and bitterness that there's scarcely room for anything else, or even the awareness that there could be anything else.

This is a haunting book. Morrison writes with such tenderness; with understanding for her characters and how they got that way. No cookie-cutter heroes or villains, and it’s so much harder to judge or dismiss people with backstories. Morrison also writes so beautifully, such powerful sentences and images. It took me a long time to read because so many paragraphs begged me to read them again.