A complex, emotional coming of age story that doesn't shy away from difficult topics.

The summer before her eagerly awaited college debut, Noni's mother moves her many states away to live in a plantation house connected with their history. Noni dreams of studying fashion design and is determined not to put down roots in this temporary rural home. She chafes under the shadow of her brilliant mother even as she begins picking away at old mysteries involving her family and the town.

The small southern town where Noni ends up has a history just as jagged as her family tree. The more she learns about the people who lived there years ago and their current descendants, the more she has to wrestle with her own ethical boundaries. What violates her personal sense of justice? Can people change? And how will learning these truths change her?

The complicated family history Noni uncovers is a fascinating (albeit heartbreaking and infuriating) thread of mystery throughout this story. The truths about slavery and lineage are all too familiar and yet all too often unacknowledged. The many people whose lives she researches are a little difficult to keep track of if I'm being honest - I would love for the physical copy of the book to have a family tree if only it could be done without spoilers.

Speaking of complicated - the relationship between Noni and her mom Radiance is thorny and layered. Noni feels unseen beside her powerhouse of a mother, who wants very much to have Noni follow in her footsteps. They clearly love each other even when they can't always get along with one another. Some of their conflict arises from regular parent/teen clashes, but some of it feels more serious in a concerning way. Radiance moves Noni around like an accessory based on Radiance's schedule, completely ignoring what is important in her teenage daughter's life. Radiance blocks every effort Noni makes to pursue fashion, forcing her to enroll in classes of Radiance's choice at community college in rural VA instead. There's no remorse for Radiance's trampling of her daughter's autonomy, and the story's resolution sees Noni finding value in being her mother's mini-me.

There's also a bit of an odd situation with Noni and another girl that feels blown out of proportion. Noni says something hurtful and offensive to a girl in town. Radiance is absolutely livid, remonstrating her daughter for using a slur - which, news to me? - and punishing her by refusing to let her attend the college of her choice in the fall. That fallout is hugely disproportionate to the page time given the aftereffects of an actual slur being used early in the book. Noni follows up her mistake with genuine remorse and anxiety, unfortunately in the form of a clearly unwanted apology and plea for forgiveness. It's an honest misstep for a teenager and one she learns from, and the revulsion and disgust with which her actions are treated feels outsized. I honestly don't know if it's a me thing or a book thing though, so please draw your own conclusions.

Maggie Thompson does a good job with the narration for the audiobook version of Tangleroot. If you have the option, audio is a great way to read this story!

Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for an audio ARC in return for my honest review.

This was a solid debut! You could really tell that Kalela Williams is a historian. Noni is such a well-developed and real/relatable main character, a face of teenage angst and rebelliousness. I could understand her resentment against her parents (mainly her mom) for moving her from New England to small town Virginia (with a very ugly past and present) over the summer and THEN forcing her to withdraw from Boston University in the fall and enroll in a VA community college instead. The lack of agency you experience as a teenager and young adult feels so unfair when you want to make your own choices and mistakes. I can't tell you how angry it made me as a teenager to constantly be told, "I know what's best for you." UGH. So frustrating!!

This book grapples with the lingering effects of slavery in the South. Noni encounters so many racist white people (who really know how to "disguise" their racism in backhanded, intentional ways). It shows how harmful denying history/our past is.

The book really speeds up at the 75 percent mark. Like seriously, so much is revealed in that last 25 percent, it was almost overwhelming. I imagine that's how Noni felt when she made the same discoveries, but I did have a hard time keeping up, especially since I was listening to the audio. I'm still not sure I got everything that happened. I really liked the narrator, but I will say that listening to JUST the audio was challenging. I had trouble keeping track of all the minor side characters (sometimes I was like, "why don't we like this person again?"). I feel like doing a tandem read with the physical/digital would have been helpful and less confusing, especially when reading journal entries from the past or hearing flashbacks.

I want to share my (spoiler-free) favorite quotes from the book (I'm quoting an ARC, so it's subject to change, and as I am quoting from the audio, the punctuation might be off. Emphasis is my own!):

It didn't feel fair. White plantation girls got such a good rap. It's like they were silk-clad myths, hustling through the halls of history. They were portrayed with no power or agency, as if white womanhood was slavery light, or there was some fabricated sisterhood between white women and Black servants, of gossip and giggles during hair brushing and corset lacing. Worse, there was a merging of those two untruths, that Black and white women were sisters striding together for freedom from the patriarchy. When our patriarchies were separate and unequal. ... Saying a slave holder was a product of their time implied there was only one way to be, that the year we were born fixed us in some snow globe of perception. But people were as prismatic as glitter, falling differently every time you shook the glass. ... There might have been a hundred ways to be a product of one's time. There must be still.

And two, I thought of the barren flowerbed that once held Robert E. Lee riding through an intended forever of all we raise high on pedestals. There are monuments poured from metals or carved from marble or chiseled into mountains. There are the simpler monuments dedicated to lives on earth, like the one I knelt in front of. And there are the monuments we create from nothing but the air of our imaginations, when we shape the truth of history into a fable. Eras become tales with a story arc. History becomes a story that places the reader at some contrived resolution, the way even the most sobering of museums deposit guests at the gift shop.

Ugh so, so good!!! We can't defend our slave holding ancestors by saying they were "products of their time." Because that implies that during their time, slavery was okay just because it was "legal." I just thought the writing in these paragraphs was beautiful.

My biggest gripe is that there is apparently an Author's Note in the digital book, but it's not there in the audio format (unless I missed it, but I don't think I did, since I tried searching both the beginning and end of the recording and... nothing). At first, I just thought there wasn't an Author's Note but found out through other early reviews that there is. This might be fixed in the final audio version (I hope Kalela Williams herself narrates it). But it makes me sad I couldn't experience it for myself, since I was/am so curious about the research and background that went into this book!

Thank you to Macmillan Audio for the advanced copy of this book!

I'll be honest, I requested this book because I love the cover. But I listened to the audiobook and found it to be absolutely captivating. Tangleroot is a YA coming-of-age novel that is largely about what it's like to do genealogical research as an African American.

Noni has grown up in her mothers shadow and feels kind of suffocated by the expectation that she follow in her footsteps. Her mom is a well-respected scholar of African-American history & literature and has just taken over as the head of a small liberal arts college in her hometown. So the summer before Noni is set to begin college, she is dragged away from her home in Boston and a desirable internship in costuming to live in the plantation house where her ancestors were enslaved. And she hates it. But as time goes on, she begins to do her own research into her family history and the history of the people who owned the plantation. Along the way she uncovers long held, sometimes painful secrets, but also finds her place in the world as a young woman.

Noni is a complex and well-drawn character. She's not perfect, but you viscerally feel her anger and frustration at her moms control of her life. And yet, there's a lot she doesn't know and lot she needs to learn. This book tackles racism of varying degrees both historically and in the modern day. It lays out a lot of important history that is sometimes glossed over because it's painful or difficult. And it pushes back on false narratives of enslaved people being treated kindly or like "family". And the messiness of family trees when you look at too common occurrence of sexual assault and unequal relationships.

This is an incredibly impressive debut novel and I could not put it down. I hope it gets into the hands of many young people! The audio narration is excellent and engrossing. I received an audio review copy via NetGalley, all opinions are my own.