emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective slow-paced
challenging informative reflective
emotional informative reflective slow-paced
informative reflective sad tense slow-paced
emotional informative reflective sad slow-paced
adventurous hopeful informative inspiring reflective tense medium-paced
challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

This is a detailed account of how badly women were treated during slavery. I could not imagine watching my mother, sister, brother, etc being fondled, striped, sold or murdered right in front of me.
The constant threats of beatings, rapes, selling off your children, are just some of the things slave owner did to keep their slaves/property in line who often were purchased for less than cattle. WOW!!!
challenging dark emotional informative reflective slow-paced

This was interesting, informative, and sad, going into far more depth about the lives of enslaved people than I had expected.The extrapolation from the simple sack to what its owners' lives must have been like felt a bit forced at times, although the author does go into some depth explaining the paucity of evidence about individual enslaved people because they were not seen as important enough to document in depth, and because they owned so little. I found this quite hard going, but I'm glad to have read it.

The history that Miles lays out here is meticulously researched and thoughtfully wrought. She has an impressive talent for elevating the dignity of the enslaved and marginalized people whose lives she is uncovering.

I was occasionally a little frustrated by the need for so much educated guesswork and conjecture in telling the story of this object and the people who passed it down, but those frustrations are a reflection of the poor preservation of Black women’s stories in history, and not of any failing by the author.