A review by notesbynnenna
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

5.0

Thank you to the publisher for giving me a free copy of this book! All opinions are my own.

Let me just start by saying this book was SO good and there’s no way my review can do it justice. 

I’d had it on my TBR for a few months. Was I intimidated by the 800 page count? Absolutely. But I’d been hearing such good things and when Oprah selected it as a book club pick, that was the final push that made me commit to reading it. 

This was such an epic family saga as Jeffers traces the history of this family over the course of several hundred years. She writes about their triumphs and struggles and secrets and she does it with such skill. I quickly became so invested in this story and reading this book made me want to learn a bit more about my own family history. It reminded me that discovering history can be exciting and difficult and rewarding all at once.

There are a lot of characters in this book and I wasn’t fully keeping track of them, but luckily there is a family tree in the front. I definitely referenced that a lot and that was how I was able to make connections between the characters in my head.

This book gives you a sweeping look at life in the South. I haven’t spent much time in the South, so that was very interesting to me. A good portion of the book takes place when slavery was legal, so of course that was difficult (also, lots of content warnings in general for this book, so I would definitely recommend researching those if you have certain triggers). Reading about the atrocities committed against Black people and Indigenous people was very difficult. At the same time, I felt like Jeffers really wrote this book for a Black audience, which I appreciated. 

These characters are so human and I thought the way that Jeffers wove this story together was masterful. She writes about the love and trauma that is passed down through generations. She writes about the history that lives in our bones, even when we’re not aware of it. What a beautiful, beautiful book.