Reviews with content warning for Slavery - Walking Gentry Home: A Memoir of My Foremothers in Verse

Walking Gentry Home by Alora Young is a book, or should I say memoir, told in verse. That in itself is something you don't come across every day, never mind find a review for on my blog. I will be the first to admit that I'm no expert on the matter, so I want to clarify that these thoughts I'm trying to compile are mostly based on what the writing made me feel - and that was a lot.

I've tried to learn a bit about my family's history, but there's many gaps and missing pieces, so I was impressed by what Alora Young uncovered and managed to bring to life on the page. Not only did she find a way to give a voice to generations that came before her, but she did so with few and yet impacting words. Her verses faced harsh realities of generational pain and trauma, but also let the light of mother- and womanhood shine through. As we followed key moments in Young's maternal ancestry, I felt the connection and ties grow beneath each one of them and me as a reader. Sometimes it was as if we read from their perspectives, sometimes it was told from Alora Young's POV and other times it almost felt like a collective consciousness.

I know this is quite the brief review, but I thought Walking Gentry Home was masterfully done. I felt the emotional tether throughout, even if I got mixed up with the timeline sometimes. All of it seems not just rooted in Young's personal family history, but that of Black history in America in general. Often thought-provoking and unflinchingly honest, it is sure to linger in your mind.

Fazit: 5/5 stars! Wonderful and impacting family history!

Content Warnings

dpearson5257's review

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

4.75

Loved this piece of art so much! This book spans over generations of the history of this country through her (our) people, through slavery, through segregation, through the Black Tax, through still not being “good enough”, to being what our ancestors fought for. This was such an inspiring piece and I’m so impressed with the authors way of words and visualizing everything. This is a tough read as anything that’s true with our history, it’s not black and white like our history books want us to believe it is now. The only very very tiny issue I had was the timeline and the characters in the beginning, you think you’re following one timeline of a family but really it’s the family but still it’s the black community as a black people in it’s entirety.

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Reviews tagging 'Slavery'

Walking Gentry Home: A Memoir of My Foremothers in Verse by Alora Young

randisworld's review against another edition

doomluz's review

lettuce_read's review

kat_impossible's review

dpearson5257's review