Those Bones Are Not My Child by Toni Cade Bambara

Those Bones Are Not My Child Reviews

• 
  Maureen

  There is no doubt that this is a hard book to read. It takes place in Atlanta during the time of the Atlanta Child Murders. I guess I like this book more than most people, because I feel that Bambara did a good job of capturing the fear and tumult that Atlanta experienced. I still have my "Save the Children" button, that many people took to wearing as some sign of solidarity during those traumatic times. It didn't matter, though, we were all looking at each other with wary eyes. Bambara also depicted life on ghetto streets, where children were no longer allowed to play or go to the store alone, with gripping accuracy. The abduction of their child is every parent's greatest fear, and to have so many young bodies found thrown off bridges or covered by leaves in the woods tore Atlanta in two. I truly believe this is book is worth reading.
• 
  Sookie

  If Netflix (and other media creators) can stop masturbating to the likes of Ted Bundy and the same bunch for five minutes, focus can shift to horrific crimes like the one in this book, that victims' families are still fighting justice for. These victims deserve our attention.
• 
  Charlotte

  DNF. (474 of 669 pages read).
  
  This book literally took away my will to read. And the annoying thing is it’s not even a bad book. I’ve read WAY worse books (the guest list I’m looking at you), and finished them.
  
  But there was something about this that I just could get on with. On paper it’s everything I want from a book, but in reality it made me never want to read anything ever again. I’ve been trying so hard because I NEVER don’t finish a book, but I have had to admit defeat after a long and tiresome war.
  
  I think the most annoying thing about this is I can’t even put my finger on why I couldn’t get on with it. I like the writing, the story is one I’m fascinated by and I truly did want to get to the end but it was like ever page I read sucked more of my soul?
  
  I haven’t even read anything in weeks because of it. I gave up on my reading challenge because of it. I don’t even know what else to say except I tried and I failed. I will make a ritual sacrifice to the book gods and hope that I can recover whatever it is that I lost trying to muddle my way through this novel.
  
  I’m hoping by finally coming to terms with the fact that I won’t be finishing it, will allow me to move on a try and pick up another book again without too much PTSD. Send all your hopes and prayers. I need them.
• 
  J.E.

  “Lady, Black boys getting killed in the South just ain’t news.”
  “And girls,” she inserted. “And women and men.”
  “I know how you feel, but I don’t make network policy. The news of the moment is Iran, when it’s not the election or stories about international terrorism.”
  
  Sounds like it could be this morning’s news. But it’s 1980 in Atlanta, and more than forty black children have in fact been murdered, in a pattern that can be traced around “the city too busy to hate.” This novel, Toni Cade Bambara’s masterwork, follows an estranged mother and father whose son goes missing just as the killings are finally becoming news.
  
  I was a child in 1980, about the same age as Zala and Spence’s younger son. I was daily reminded of the U.S. hostages held in Iran, but I had no idea that in the next state, the deadly backdrop to this book was unfolding. Atlanta was supposed to be the Black Mecca of the New South, progressive and free. It had a black mayor and new black police officers; one of them, Sergeant B. J. Greaves, is a character in the novel. I never saw a black police officer the whole time I was growing up—or a woman—but I knew such things were possible, because they were characters in books.
  
  It was in reading those same books at school that I first came across fiction by Toni Cade Bambara. “Raymond’s Run” is one of those unforgettable stories that has stayed with me since childhood. So to discover this big novel, published after her death in 1995, is a real pleasure.
  
  A pleasure, despite the horror that is at the heart of the story. For Bambara’s writing is so beautiful, illuminating the most everyday details of a family’s life, which will never be everyday again. She is in absolute command of her characters’ perspective, the viewpoints of both parents, the younger son and daughter. Through their increasingly desperate efforts to find out what happened to Sonny and the other children, Bambara shows us a city in the round. The upwardly mobile Atlantans, the Vietnam vets like Spence, elderly black residents who have seen it all. Whatever their class or background, none of these characters are victims, except in the true sense of being victims of crime. They never whine. They have confidence and pride.
  
  Because of the richness of detail with which she writes, Bambara does the best thing I think a novelist can do: she takes the reader into another world. I see the banana magnet on the car ashtray, the kids at the boys’ club, the African-identified activists in the park. I am back in the time, though not the place, of my childhood, its phones, furniture, school buildings. The horror of what is happening to the children is more real, not because Bambara writes violence (which is never gratuitous) but because she places it in the ordinary world, the one we live in.
  
  Bambara was an important figure in both feminism and African-American studies, as well as an accomplished filmmaker. All of this comes through in a highly cinematic novel. We learn a lot as readers, but she is never preachy. Instead, she sets the story in the context of other events of the time: the Harvey Milk assassinations, the Jim Jones massacre, David Duke and Jesse Helms, the struggle of Black Britons and South Africans. The mystery grows so big that the main characters almost feel lost, as they surely must have in real life—yet Bambara regains the thread of their story just when we’ve given it up for lost.
  
  From beyond the grave, Bambara tells a human story, at a time when we cannot be reminded too often that “Black Lives Matter.” To all of us, because we are part of each other, and part of the same world. Last week* many RedState activists were calling a broadcaster who challenged Donald Trump a whore and a lesbian, and the man in the White House a “nigger.” I only wish the country of this novel felt more distant than it does.
  
  
  *
  http://www.economist.com/news/united-...
  
• 
  Latiffany

  I wrote a long review about this book and magically it disappeared. I'm taking that as a sign to be brief about my feelings regarding this book and move on to the next novel that awaits me.
  
  This isn't a good read. It is way too long and rather than focusing on the plot it reads like research on the Atlanta Child Murders instead of the novel that it presents itself to be. The characters seem to be thrown in as needed and the main character-the missing son- is rarely even focused on. The book completely lacks emotion. I am not certain that the mother even missed her son, Sundiata. It felt like the real joy was being apart of the movement to find the murderer(s) of the children.
  
  I understand that writers use the creative non fiction genre to use fictional characters to develop factual plots, but it is way too obvious in this "novel."
  
  However, from research I know that Bambara passed away before the publication of this novel. Her friend and literary heavy weight Toni Morrison is responsible for the end result. It is unfortunate that the reader will never know what Bambara would have done with her 1200 page manuscript had she lived to take part in the editing and publication.
  
  Finally, there are passages in this book that read like beautiful poetry and are completely mesmerizing. However, those passages are too few and hardly enough to sustain the work. You must have a deep interest in the Atlanta Child murders and a lot of patience to read this book.
• 
  NamLitFollows

  "While we may despise the treachery of lies, we seem to fear the squalor of the truth even more. Let us bow our heads and pray for the strength to overcome our own fearfulness...The government invented the term credibility gap to cover the distance between what officials know and what they tell us".
  
  One of the most horrifying and saddest books about racial injustice I've read- this is the story of parents Zala and Spence who are looking for the son Sonny, probably abducted by a series of serial murderers who have murdered young black kids from the late 70s to early 1980s. But because of the children's races and skin color, their senseless murders are met with indifference and ignorance, seen as disposable with no regard for their lives. The actual events took place during this time, but Ms. Bambara creates a fictional yarn that is a race against time to find the missing Sonny, his worried and frantic parents becoming suspects themselves in his disappearance. Edited by the late great Professor Toni Morrison, this book shows off her miraculous skills and a master of grammar and language to capture the harrowing emotions as one might experience when they know no one wants to help their children be found.
  
  Grim, serious, without a shred of humor, this belongs up there with the other great classics of Black protest such as The Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Devil finds Work by James Baldwin, Paradise by Toni Morrison; and Richard Wright's Native Son.
• 
  Alexa

  This started off beautifully, yet I found it degenerating into a confusing mess. At times it is a glorious weaving, and at other times it’s a giant knot of confusing threads with no coherent whole. Her weaving is beautiful, in fact her individual threads are beautiful, but all too often I was left confused and frustrated. She is at her best when writing of the individual lives, the interpersonal relationships, the meaning of family. She is at her worst attempting to convey facts, hints of possibilities, following up the potential clues of the mystery, tracking all the various characters and their actions. I couldn’t keep track of the cast of thousands, and she seemed to make no effort to give me their characters. Still some of the moments were exquisite. There is a beautiful scene where members of an extended family are wandering through a meadow, describing the properties of the various plants while ruminating on their love lives, that is so evocative, yet it contributes absolutely nothing towards the plot itself. I can see this working beautifully as an intertwined set of short stories, as a novel it left me seriously wanting.
• 
  Hadley

  Toni Cade Bambara, a writer, documentary filmmaker and screenwriter, gives True Crime readers a unique viewpoint of the real Atlanta Child Murders. Bambara mostly writes from the eyes of Marzala, a mother of three whose oldest son goes missing during one of the worst murder sprees in Atlanta's history. Marzala and her family were not actual people during this time- - - all of them are based off of parents and siblings of the real victims. Not soon after Marzala does everything she can with the police to find her son, she joins a group of African-Americans that are outraged by the lack of progress to catch who is killing Atlanta's black children. This group forms what is called STOP (a citizen-run task force). For the majority of the book, Marzala with most of the black community in the area typed out letters to prominent government officials asking for help to stop the murders, also using Vietnam vets in the area to use their tracking skills to keep an eye on suspects, and investigating buildings that police refused to believe had anything to do with the childrens' disappearances and/or murders, which Bambara did an amazing job putting all the real facts together of the actual community members that were involved with this at the time. This story is upsetting, but enlightening on how politics may have caused so many children to be murdered. This is a story no reader will ever forget.
  
  
  
  Bambara writes not in a normal narrative - - - just telling a story from specific viewpoints, but she often breaks off into smash poetry to depict a character's state-of-mind, which, sometimes can be off putting for the reader, breaking the flow of the story. Yet, the use of smash poetry combined with the era and the heart breaking subject at hand, separates Those Bones Are Not My Child from every True Crime book I have ever read. But a note for fans of True Crime, this story is from the view point of the victims' families and the search they went through to try and catch the murderer(s), unlike most TC books, which follow the police through the investigation leading to, usually, the capture of the perpetrator. From living in Atlanta during the time of the murders, Bambara was able to reconstruct the life of a black family in 1980's Georgia, while focusing on the effect these terrible crimes had on the surrounding community. Bambara did an amazing job on what most writers cannot.
  
  
  
  The amount of characters, specifically the fictional ones, are very well created. She describes just enough to give readers the ability to tell them apart, showing every now and then from their own viewpoints. Out of all the characters, I came to really like Zala's two other children: Kenti and Kofi. One particular scene shows the strain of Sonny's disappearance on their family: " Zala parked the comb again and sat back. 'Listen, you two.' Kofi dropped down onto his knees. 'The police and the newspapers don't know what the hell is going on, so they feel stupid, because they're supposed to know, they're trained to know, they're paid to know. It's their job. Understand? But it's hard for grown-ups to admit they're stupid, especially if they're professionals like police and reporters. So they blame the children. Or they ignore them and fill up the papers with the hostages in Iran. Understand? And now... Jesus... they've got people calling those kids juvenile delinquents.'
  
  'Don't cry.' Kenti tried to lean into her lap and got pushed away.
  
  'They don't know a damn thing and they act like they don't want to know. So they blame the kids 'cause they can't speak up for themselves. They say the kids had no business being outdoors, getting themselves in trouble.'
  
  'You let us go outdoors.'
  
  'Of course I do, baby. We go lots of places, 'cause a lot of people fought hard for our right to go any damn where we please. But when the children go out like they've a right to and some maniac grabs them, then it's the children's fault or the parents who should've been watching every minute, like we don't have to work like dogs just to put food on the table.'
  
  Kofi walked on his knees towards the bed, but he didn't lean on her like he wanted 'cause she might push him away. So he just put his hand on the mattress next to hers."
  
  
  
  During the Atlanta Child Murders, victims were random, except for that they were children from the same neighborhood, and they were African-American. At first, police didn't believe a serial murderer was going around abducting children, but rather that 'poor, broken' families were killing their own. In the Prologue, Bambara shows that the victims' families and private detectives came up with more ideas of the motive than the police did:
  
  " White cops taking license in Black neighborhoods.
  
  The Klan and other Nazi thugs on the rampage.
  
  Diabolical scientists experimenting on Third World people.
  
  Demonic cults engaging in human sacrifices.
  
  A 'Nam vet unable to make the transition.
  
  UFO aliens conducting exploratory surgery.
  
  Whites avenging Dewey Baugus, a white youth beaten to death in spring '79, allegedly by Black youths.
  
  Parents of a raped child running amok with 'justice.'
  
  Porno filmmakers doing snuff flicks for entertainment.
  
  A band of child molesters covering their tracks.
  
  New drug forces killing the young (unwitting?) couriers of the old in a bid for turf.
  
  Unreconstructed peckerwoods trying to topple the Black administration.
  
  Plantation kidnappers of slave labor issuing the pink slip.
  
  White mercenaries using Black targets to train death squadrons for overseas jobs and for domestic wars to come. "
  
  
  
  All of these theories are explored with evidence in Those Bones Are Not My Child. One scene in Part III, Zala's cop friend, B.J. shows up to her house to tell her to stop bringing attention to the investigation, " 'That Eubanks woman - - - your husband's friend? - - - she said you were bringing in the TV networks to blow the case open. I thought we had an agreement to keep each other informed. This morning I find out through the grapevine that you parents got a medium stashed in a hotel here in town, some woman who's been making headlines up north with cases that supposedly have the authorities stumped. If you knew how much work has been done on this case - - - no, listen, don't interrupt me. Then I find out - - - and not from you - - - that some of you parents are planning to tour the country cracking on the investigation. That's not too smart. And you should have told me.' " These two may have been fictional characters, but in Bambara's Acknowledgments, she states that all scenarios were true, and that she made B.J. to tell about the actual police officers who were involved with the investigation.
  
  
  
  The tension between the police and the public is felt throughout the entire story. Despite all of the work the citizen task force put in, police arrested a man named Wayne Williams for the murder of two adult victims (who, due to their mental age, which was stated to be that of children, were placed on the victims' list of the Atlanta Child Murders): " Wayne Williams, charged with the murder of twenty-seven-year-old Nathaniel Cater and implicated in the murder of the other adults and children on the official list..." Zala, having worked for almost a year at the STOP offices, she, along with most of the community, doubt that Williams was a lone killer or even the killer at all. Williams never stood trial for the childrens' murders, but the police informed the public that he did it, case closed - - - although, after Williams' arrest, children were still being abducted and their bodies were still being found. Even after Williams' trial and the guilty verdict for two adult victims, some people stuck around to continue to investigate and claim Williams a 'scapegoat' of politics: " There were still pockets of interest and people who wouldn't let the case go. James Baldwin had been coming to town off and on; a book was rumored. Sondra O'Neale, the Emory University professor, hadn't abandoned her research, either. From time to time, TV and movie types were in the city poking around for an angle. Camille Bell was moving to Tallahassee to write up the case from the point of view of the STOP committee. The vets had taken over The Call now that Speaker was working full-time with the Central American Committee. The Revolutionary Communist Party kept running pieces on the case in the Revolutionary Worker. Whenever Abby Mann sent down a point man for his proposed TV docudrama, the Atlanta officials and civil rights leaders would go off the deep end. " At the end of it all, the questions still remain: did Williams kill all of those children by himself? Was he part of a pornographic cult that killed the children? Or is Williams completely innocent, and the murderer(s) are still out there? In Those Bones Are Not My Child, I guarantee you will be left questioning if the police were right.
  
  
  
  All in all, the writing transitions can become confusing sometimes, especially the interludes of smash poetry, but I highly recommend this book to people who like the True Crime genre, especially of any interest in this specific case.
  
  For more True Crime book reviews, check out my blog at GoreAndTea.com
• 
  Felix Mcnulty

  Like others I found this a difficult read and it took a while. It may not have been intentional (in light of the posthumous publication) but it felt to me as though the form and in places difficulty of the prose captured something about horrifying things also being in reality tedious, knotted, and neverending. It felt as though packaging the narrative in a more digestible format would have been a lie, maybe. Anyway, I’m glad I stayed with it, and I will probably read it over again to pick up on new or different things because there’s a lot I will have missed the first time round. It’s a commitment of a book.
• 
  Mentai

  Much of Bambara's writing here is breathtaking and she lifts injustice and personal pain beyond the mere documenting of her research on these cases and their aftermath. But the work also suffers from lack of clear editing and should have been much shorter. Nevertheless her opus has stayed with me, the musical language and evocation of Atlanta.
• 
  K.S.C.

  I do not read mystery genre style books often, as it’s just not my interest, and this book definitely had qualities of mystery fiction that I find hard to follow - BUT this book is amazing. It’s speculative non-fiction. Filling in the gaps and view of a case that is an absolute miscarriage of justice and really makes me wonder how Black folk in America are not angrier. Bambara’s writing is timeless, using the context of just one case where Black voices are disregarded and the value of Black lives minimised to point to the damage caused in any context by systemic oppression of a people.
  
  Some lines are so damn poignant I had to pause and just soak them up after reading:
  “Legend making was the impulse to exempt the ordinary self from responsible action” for example.
  
  An epic read, but worth it for anyone who seeks to understand better the complexity of experience in America.
• 
  Rachel

  I don’t feel like it is fair to rate this book as I only read 200 pages of it but i just could not get engaged in it. It didn’t capture my interest and I found myself looking on my phone or getting otherwise distracted.
  
  It follows the quotidian life of 2 parents after their son goes missing and the racism they face trying to get the police to do anything about it. I think it is just too slow paced for my liking right now although the dragging monotony of life without any answers or progression echoes the parents experiences.
• 
  Peacegal

  This is an in-depth novel set in Atlanta, GA, in the early 1980s...a terrifying time when African American children were going missing and murdered and it was basically being swept under the rug by authorities.
  
  The writing style was unusual. It has a way of talking around scenes that I've seen in other books and which never fails to confuse me. I don't know if it's me or what, but I had difficulty trying to discern who was speaking and what the setting was.
  
  The writing style is incredibly detailed, with rich descriptions of even some of the smallest aspects of different scenes.
• 
  poppy

  i bought this book as it seemed like it would be slightly like a mystery but for me it didn’t feel like it. i was confused the whole time and ended up skimming the whole lot. from the changing perspectives to how it switched all the time, i got confused on what was going on in the story
• 
  Sarah

  I really wanted to love this book, but I can't force myself to read it anymore or keep pretending that I'm going to finish it. It has some engaging moments, but it's mostly too all over the place and hard to follow. DNF around page 285.
• 
  Vel Veeter

  There’s a little live-blogging happening in this review as I work my way through the book. The book is very very good, oddly not nearly as depressingly sad as I thought it would be (though very depressingly sad), and much more complex, nuanced, intelligent and erudite than what I thought the book was going to be based on the description. Not to say that I didn’t think Toni Cade Bambara was capable of such a book, but I just didn’t realize that’s the book I was picking up.
  
  The book takes places mostly in 1980 in Atlanta during the child murders that killed 28 people, mostly children along with a few adults. It’s a focus of the second season of Mindhunter I believe, but I haven’t watched that yet, and it’s the focus of books by James Baldwin, Tayari Jones, and plenty of others. It’s also almost completely erased from the white mainstream consciousness, to the degree that I didn’t even know about these murders (which happened right around time of my birth) despite having family in Atlanta and visiting fairly often as a kid. I take responsibility for my own ignorance on the topic and am working to correct that now, but I really do believe that this is not a topic white people or white history really discusses much, and this book explores this in part.
  
  The novel itself takes places mainly within a family where one of the children has gone missing — speculation is high on all fronts about what explains his disappearance. The mother and father believe he has been taken (they are not together any longer but spend weeks and weeks searching and protesting and agitating in the local movement), the police believe that his disappearance like most child disappearances is a runaway situation, something they inherently believe about missing Black children anyway, and want this to be true because of the burden it seemingly lifts from their shoulders.
  
  The book also spends a few chapters in second person with you taking on the role of a mother waiting for her child to return home, only overdue by a few hours.
  
  The reason the book is a little less known than many of the other texts on this subject is because Toni Cade Bambara died before publishing it and it becomes a project that Toni Morrison helped to bring to publication. The book is also very long (just under 700 pages) and while the text is heavy (gravity wise) and dense at times, the book is incredibly readable, but I think this combination of factors plus the politics of racism and sexism, and the erasure of these events in wider culture probably made this book less viable as a product.
• 
  J

  (FROM JACKET)"Those Bones Are Not My Child" is a staggering achievement: the novel that Toni Cade Bambara worked on for twelve years until her death in 1995-a story that puts us at the center of the nightmare of the Atlanta child murders.
  
  It was called "The City Too Busy To Hate", but two decades ago more than forty black children were murdered there with grim determination, their bodies found-in ditches, on riverbeds-strangled, beaten, and sexually assaulted. Bambara was living in Atlanta at the time, and "Those Bones Are Not My Child" is the result of her painstaking first-hand research, as she delved into the murders and the world in which they occured. Evoking the culture of the late 1970s and earyl '80s with a keen eye-the Iranian hostage crisis, disco, Travis Bickle of "Taxi Driver"-"Those Bones Are Not My Child" powerfully dramatizes the story of one black family surviving on the margins of a seemingly prosperous city.
  
  On Sunday morning, July 20, 1980, Marzala Rawls Spencer awakens to find that her teenage son has gone missing, even as the Atlanta child abductions are beginning to be reported. As she and her estranged husband frantically search for their son, the story moves with authority through the full spectrum of Atlanta's political, social, and cultural life, illuminating the vexing issues of race and class that bedevil the city.
  
  Suspenseful, richly dramatic, profoundly affecting, "Those Bones Are Not My Child" explores the complex relationships within one family in dire crisis. And as Toni Morrison, who edited Bambara's manuscript, has observed, it is also "the narrative revelation of a major Southern city of the '80s, a revelation of what clogs the bloodstream of 'The City Too Bust To Hate.'"
• 
  Susan

  I have been looking at this book on my shelf for some years. I love the work of Toni Cade Bambara, especially her previous novel, The Salt Eaters. Those Bones is not an easy read, but it is an extraordinary one. It is the story of one woman, one family, one city and indeed all of the USA. The story is about a spate of murders that occurred in Atlanta n the early 1980s. More than 40 black children were abducted, sexually abused, beaten and murdered. But the establishment deemed them runaways and did nothing.
  
  One morning the 13-year-old son of Mazala and Spence goes missing. They do everything to try to find him. The women in the community delve into what's happened, parents spend months doing daily searches, the men patrol the areas where the children have been found (those that were) dead.
  
  This book gives a portrait of a city unable to answer questions from its citizens. Toni Cade Bambara illuminates how oppression works and one can see these events being repeated in many cities around the world.
  
  A truly great read.
  
• 
  Lee

  After reading the first chapter, I wanted to stop, but I went on because I also wanted to give this writer a chance and trust Toni Morrison's opinion. It was a waste of time. I still don't know what the real problem of this book is; I know that Bambara died before having the possibility to edit it, and maybe that's the reason it feels really "heavy". I expected a moving story from a mother's point of view, but what I've got is a cold list of facts about what happened in Atlanta during the 80s. I found it very difficult to read, and I'm convinced that it's because it has been written FOR americans who lived during those years, taking a lot for granted. I'm disappointed, especially because after 600+ pages, we still don't know what the hell happened to Sonny. It's all too vague. I don't recommend this book unless you're obsessed with Atlanta and the case of missing children.
• 
  Tiffany Anderson

  A necessary read but difficult to follow. This work parallels reality and lets us know the more things change, the more things stay the same. I've always wanted to know what follow through, if any, occurred with this case. From this novel, I know those families never stopped searching for answers and justice.
• 
  Jessie

  This is a hard book, but an important one. The clunky nature of the writing is explained by the author passing away before it was edited. I found it easiest to read in small chunks to be sure. It isn't a treat to read, but it will change you.
• 
  Bernard Norcott-mahany

  The book seemed a bit long, and the middle section seemed to drag a lot. The work was not edited when the author died, and one cannot think but that Bambara would have tightened up the work quite a bit. The opening section and the concluding sections, though, are quite compelling.
• 
  Darlene

  one month of confusion
• 
  Nuria

  2 out of 5 stars for the two-fifths of the book that were comprehensible. This book honestly had me doubting my ability to read.
• 
  Kimberley

  I wanted to like this book but it was painfully long and, somewhere around the halfway point, I began to resent its length and chastised myself for choosing to involve myself in something that brought so much angst: I hate quitting any book I pick up but there were points where this book nearly put me in a reading slump.
  
  Every time I looked at it, I felt guilty because I knew I should be reading it but simply didn’t want to; it was too many pages and many of those pages had already proved to be unnecessary.
  
  The thought of reading 300 more like it?
  
  No thank you.
  
  I dare say that the death of Bambara, prior to her being able to complete this work, left her editor (the incomparable Toni Morrison) with the painful dilemma of knowing what to cut and what to keep; an impossible task given the amount of research done and the sheer behemoth of a manuscript left behind (1200+ pages).
  
  That said, it’s impossible to be sure where Bambara’s voice ends and Toni’s began; for me, it was difficult to connect with either voice and it was often confusing to keep track of a missing son when his parents are so often lost in their own meandering thoughts.
  
  And while I understood the idea of allowing the reader into the disjointed and troubled minds of the parents, it was ...a lot.
  
  Spence too often traversed into his traumas from the Vietnam war and Zala would become obsessed over the details of a given moment. Throw in the meandering thoughts of their younger children and ...well.
  
  I just.
  
  It was a lot to read and I often didn’t see what the point in reading a lot of it was; especially since most of it gave no insight and often had zero to do with anything else.
  
  What is clear it this is a book about the ways we dismiss Black and Brown children; we simply don’t care what happens to them and we’re so comfortable letting them get lost in negative narratives that we fail to recognize their value.
  
  They’re all of our children too.
  
  That much was clear throughout the book.
  
  I just wish it were a more interesting story in getting to its end.
  
  I won’t lie, I finally gave up on any hope of going page-by-page; it simply became more than I could stand and I bowed out around page 400: opting to skim the rest of the way, rather than further subject myself to the random musings of its main characters.
  
  If you decide to undertake this novel, do so with a ton of patience.
  
  As for what’s left of mine, there is none. This book wore me out and I’m disappointed I wasn’t able to appreciate it as much as I’d hoped.
• 
  J

  3.5!!
  
  Her writing is completely luminous and urgent, a million characters each with their own way of thinking, plot being joyously sacrificed to the tangle of every day Black life - but that makes this book, which is what I didn't realise is an account of 29 real child murders in Atlanta in the 80s, very hard to read at times. What should be a political thriller loops and is just too, too long (almost 700 pages!) ; Bambara loves families too much, exploring every detail, to make a story jump linearly ahead, ramping up tension. Constant conspiracy and references to the Klan, cp rings, drug rings, arms rings, almost become cartoonish, like a badly written drama, worse because it ends with no answers.
  
  I loved the Spencers, the central family, I loved the ways they spoke, argued, healed, lost it and got their minds back again (my favourite quote - "I'd rather be crazy than an amnesiac") and the completely stand out scene of this novel was a small family one where they are all watching eachother after their brother goes missing, where huge events are condensed into a side eye from a harassed mother.
  
  And maybe even this style conveys well the tumult, endless waiting and agony, mundane sandwich making and anxiety about random violence, that gripped Atlanta during this period...? Couldn't completely recommend though.