Ashanti > Recent Status Updates

I’m adopting Circe, that poor, naïve, goodest of girls.

Would you rather: a) raise kids in the spirit of forgiveness, such that they can know inner peace? or b) raise kids in the spirit of vengeance, so that if anything ever happens to you, they’ll kill the motherfucker who did it?

It’s great! I love the connections being made between Black ways of speaking and jazz practice. I love seeing these structures I’ve experienced but never articulated made so thoroughly visible. I’m getting through it a lot slower than my last book because it’s dense enough that I have to reread passages (and in general slow down to process more info), but it’s great.

This book is so well-paced and structured. Every chapter has a new, yet organic revelation that sustains momentum and makes me evermore interested in what happens next. My biggest issue is that, as much as this book wants to address the history of institutional and personalized racism, 1) the story doesn’t center enough Black perspectives, and 2) the story isn’t nearly so insightful or curious about gender.