trishwah 's review for:

All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles

3.0

---

I struggled with this book. It's about an interesting artifact, but 385 pages was excessive. I think I would have liked it as a TED talk, or maybe as a work of historical fiction. There are a lot of historical tangents, which I've liked in, for example, The Library Book. But whereas Susan Orlean writes for a general audience, the language for much of this book was rather academic, which made it slow going. There were a lot of places where the historical record can't tell us anything certain about the hands through which this artifact passed. The author asks us, often in poetic language, to imagine a lot. There are also a lot of places where I felt like she was making points she had already made. I say this about a lot of authors, but more diligent editing might have been nice. I seriously considered not finishing it. But at that point, I had invested so much time in it, I wanted it to be counted for my yearly reading goal.