Merle
This book is more like a collection of short stories, following black girls and women, but also a non-binary person through different times in England. Their lives are all somehow connected, they are each others partners, friends, mothers, daugthers, grandmothers and so much more. One woman, Amma, seems to stand out. Somehow, every story comes back to her; so for me Amma is kind of the protagonist of this book. I struggled a bit with the book, because it is written in a way that reminds me of poetry slam. And basically, whenever I started a chapter about a new character, the first pages didn't interest me and I paused. But when I finally got the motivation to continue, every single one of the stories amazed me - just never from the beginning. The stories deal with different topics; race, gender, sexuality, class, occupation, family, origin, ... it includes such a diverse cast of characters, perspectives and voices, and it made me more aware of some struggles in the Black community. My favorite stories were those of Dominique, Shirley and Megan/Morgan. I also loved how the translators handled the pronouns in the German translation for Morgan who is non-binary; there isn't yet a universally accepted pronoun for non-binary people in German, and the translators used "sier" and I really liked it. Like, some translators just leave the English "they" in the German translation and that always throws me out of my reading flow... For a five star rating, I just struggled too much with the very peculiar writing style, none of the perspectives had me hooked from the first page, and for my personal taste, there were too many perspectives. I don't even remember all of them, and while reading the book I already kept confusing some characters when they were referred to in a different character's perspective
