I really loved this book. I really wanted to read more non-fiction book this year and learn about different historical things that I can not learn of in Puerto Rico. This one was great, I like the balance between the information giving and not feeling like it dragged or it was info/stat heavy.

I do recommend this one.

I got an e-arc of this book on NetGalley. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

In writing this review, I keep stumbling into a tone that feels like gatekeeping. What I think is that this is a very Chicago book. Well, yes, and every review is going to call this a love letter to Chicago. The author calls this a love letter to Chicago. But I mean that this book is a pure expression of the City's character. I worry that will be taken as a sort of sublimation, or an appropriation, of the book's equally unapologetic Blackness. But that's just it, it's the same thing. I do not mean the centrality of Blackness to the City's identity, though the book is a good argument for that, but there is a way that the book feels its feels that puts it in continuity with the best writing both on and of Chicago.

Since it is about race, there are bound to be some people who do not get that, and it is probably worth the sort of question as to why I feel the need to, or have the sort of right to, assert that. But I think that the importance there is how treating it as a love letter is insufficient to explain why it is so great. My only problems are structural. Some of the topics need longer discussion, so I hope that the book is a jumping off place for people. I also think that organization by topic is not always in the service of clarity. There are interesting chronological or (more specific) geographical overlaps that create interesting stories in themselves, but you have to put some work in to see in this context. But when my complaint is fundamentally that there is not enough of it, it's good.

My thanks to the author, Arionne Nettles, for writing the book and to the publisher, Lawrence Hill Books for making the ARC available to me.