Time's Undoing by Cheryl A. Head

 

This was a novel that I really wanted to like, about the long stain of racism and how its victims have struggled to have lives and loved ones they cherished, and about answering questions about your family older than your parents. Alas, it's really not a very good novel: The prose just lies inert on the page, with no sparkle or joy and barely any signs of life; the story is kinda obvious, especially once you twig to the author's premises and priors; much of the incident that *isn't* about racism in policing in the Deep South strikes me as amazingly implausible; the fact one of the POV characters turns out to be a ghost is something like cheap; the multiple timelines end up serving little purpose, the heart of the story is in the present, not the past, the events of the past probably would have been better served if they'd been reduced in number (and in overall length). This is a novel that wants to use its story to say something, and I agree with what it's trying to say, but the story itself completely fails to carry the weight, here.