T. Geronimo Johnson

I think this book had a lot of important stuff to say and that it spent a lot more time doing weird ham-fisted comedy/melodrama than saying important stuff about race and acceptance and ambiguity around those topics. What was supposed to work as comedy didn't really land for me as comedy, and the tricks with the conventions of fiction didn't land either. There were passages that I had trouble understanding at all because they seemed like in-jokes or just sort of went off into the weeds. On the whole, I wish the book had been tightened up a lot and had dwelled more on the serious issues addressed in a late brief diatribe, and on that really pretty gripping confrontation in the Holler, with its concluding and very telling punishment.… (more)