A review by pangnaolin
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson

challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad tense fast-paced

4.0

i have very mixed feelings about this book. on one hand, it was easy to read (accessibility-wise; its content was intense, obviously) and kept me entirely engaged. the stories stevenson told were incredibly important ones to hear and often left me with quite a heavy feeling that took time to sit with & work through. i loved it to that extent.

at the same time, this book felt like an introduction that led in a direction i slightly disliked. i feel that stevenson functioned on the idea that this system is broken and must be fixed, despite his ability to address the way plantations directly led to prisons and things of the like (which, in my eyes, should make obvious the fact that the system is functioning entirely as intended). he returned to the idea of mercy, which feels silly to me when we're discussing people who have been systematically targeted by a system created to exploit them. is it mercy to try to help them out of that system? really?

anyway, i definitely liked the book and felt that he presented good information & research alongside really hard-hitting stories. it felt more like a series of essays than i expected (i thought i was walking into more of a 'memoir' that would focus on his story as a throughline), but i wasn't mad at that at all. i honestly liked it more! at the same time, as an abolitionist, it fell a little flat.