Mike S. (mikesmith) reviewed Where Did You Sleep Last Night?: A Personal History on + 50 more book reviews
In WHERE DID YOU SLEEP LAST NIGHT, Danzy Senna presents a compellingly interesting exploration of her family's strange and complicated history.
Senna--whose white mother's family came to America on the Mayflower, profited from the slave trade, and served as a pillar in Boston's founding and literary society; whose black father's family is a murky mix of unknown fathers and contradictory tales; and whose parents split when she was still young in a violent and traumatic divorce--does have quite a story to tell, and she tells it here in a unique and readable way.
Instead of researching her family's history in a historian's straightforward manner, Senna, a novelist, explores it and researches it a stream-of-consciousness sort of way, and the result, although not as linear or chronological as most history books or Alex Haley's ROOTS, really does work, because it makes the reader an involved part of the process of discovery.
The book is sometimes funny, often poignant, mysterious and engaging and exciting, satisfying in its conclusions, and always well-written. I liked it, a lot, and I plan to read Senna's other works as well.
Recommended for anyone interested in American attitudes about race, in the mysteries of who we are and how our families led up to us, in black and white relations, in the effects of divorce and domestic abuse on children, or in good, real-life mysteries.
Just plain RECOMMENDED. It's a good book, this one.
Senna--whose white mother's family came to America on the Mayflower, profited from the slave trade, and served as a pillar in Boston's founding and literary society; whose black father's family is a murky mix of unknown fathers and contradictory tales; and whose parents split when she was still young in a violent and traumatic divorce--does have quite a story to tell, and she tells it here in a unique and readable way.
Instead of researching her family's history in a historian's straightforward manner, Senna, a novelist, explores it and researches it a stream-of-consciousness sort of way, and the result, although not as linear or chronological as most history books or Alex Haley's ROOTS, really does work, because it makes the reader an involved part of the process of discovery.
The book is sometimes funny, often poignant, mysterious and engaging and exciting, satisfying in its conclusions, and always well-written. I liked it, a lot, and I plan to read Senna's other works as well.
Recommended for anyone interested in American attitudes about race, in the mysteries of who we are and how our families led up to us, in black and white relations, in the effects of divorce and domestic abuse on children, or in good, real-life mysteries.
Just plain RECOMMENDED. It's a good book, this one.
