Maud Newton

This is an autobiographical story of a woman trying to come to terms with her family heritage both in terms of mental health and their various misdeeds in the past. (Racism and slavery are the big ones). She goes back many, many generations and she has done a vast amount of research. I loved when she wrote about her family stories but bogs down when she describes other books on ancestry and genetics. Also toward the end she believes she has found a way to contact relatives from hundreds of years ago. Call me a skeptic.… (mehr)

(38) Ugh. I so disliked this book - it took me forever to read and was really a chore at the end. I sadly bought a hard cover version of this book based on something promising I read or heard and was looking forward to it with my new love of non-fiction and my son's curiosity regarding genetics and genealogy. But it was just .... not good. The author is a lawyer who fancies herself a writer who writes this extend amateurish term paper regarding her research into genealogy; her own family history; and some bizarre musings and explorations into the practice of ancestor worship.

It turns out she is just really disappointed because not only does she have no black descendants; she finds out her family (from the Mississippi Delta, no less) was actually; shockingly -- racist. Evangelical. Mentally ill. Violent. All the things that a wanna be bougie progressive writer abhors. Sigh. We get it. We are glad you had your own personal "reckoning" with race.

The chapters would seem to start off pseudo-intellectual with some quotes from primary sources, newspaper clipping, a thesis of sorts -- and then be so rambling and disconnected and repetitive. I completely lost track which great great great grandfather or grandmother she was talking about even with re-reading. Whenever she went into the ancestor worship and her fat fairy blue moth-like guide; I was done. I threw up in my mouth and shut the book.

Just.. bad. I won't get the time or money back, so I finished. Only redeeming thing - I am certainly interested in the life of my ancestors and the karmic, cosmic connection that might exist. This is worth exploring. But the execution of this premise was dreadful. One of the worst books I have read and certainly bought in recent memory.… (mehr)