TRIGGER WARNING

A woman’s early trauma spirals over decades until middle age, when impending divorce sends her on a cross-country journey to reconnect with her sister and their shared past.

Ruth’s red hair, freckles, and light skin often convince people she’s white, although she identifies as Black. She just doesn’t identify with her personal history. Even her attorney husband, Myron, also Black, and their nonbinary child, Enix, don’t know her true origins in California and their accompanying trauma, involving a sibling’s childhood death and her father’s murder by a police officer neighbor. Chapters from the perspectives of different characters, including Myron, Enix, and Ruth’s childhood friend Clarisse, who’s bipolar, slowly reveal background—not for readerly suspense, but to demonstrate how distanced Ruth is from her past. She and her family live in Louisville, Kentucky, where Enix attends an all-girls private school that they chose but now loathe. The author highlights constant microaggressions the family faces partly through the lens of Myron’s best friend, Anthony, a white fellow lawyer who tries way too hard to seem Black—and whose friendship to both Myron and Ruth matters to the deliberately tangled plot. After Ruth and Myron’s house burns down, she files for divorce and takes Enix on a cross-country car trip so poorly planned and executed that the teen chooses to fly home to her father rather than meet her unknown aunt, Wendy, in Sacramento. Whether it’s Myron’s skepticism about his new girlfriend, Paulina; Clarisse’s boredom with a psych ward’s activities; or the loving welcome Wendy offers Ruth, each character’s attitudes and actions resonate with authentic observation that speaks to the author’s dedication page which lists several dozen names (including that of Breonna Taylor) “and the incalculable number of others who’ve suffered and died under the heel of state-sponsored terrorism since the very inception of the state. And for their families, and their communities, and all of us who struggle to heal.”

An unusual novel that will challenge readers and keep them alert to how complex PTSD can affect people years into the future.