This book feels like the ache at the bottom of your heart when you know something is missing. It centers around a man and a woman who are not named and are connected by something intangible. True love’s course never runs smooth and this book feels like an exploration of that quote, but instead of feeling tired and overdone it feels fresh, unique and bitterly beautiful. There’s an understanding of how complex love can be, how it’s not an act or a feeling or a word. In fact words with their various meanings and flimsiness are constantly mentioned throughout the story as not being enough.

You don’t always like those you love unconditionally. Language fails us, always. Flimsy things, these words. And everything flounders in the face of real gratitude, which even a thank you cannot surmise, but a thank you to her also.


I believe this is in part an attempt to tell the reader that even this book is not enough. No words can describe the feeling of fitting in with someone like a jigsaw piece, the feeling of knowing someone for all of your life despite only meeting them the day before. No book is enough when it comes to such a powerful experience, but this one comes as close as any.

The prose itself is alluring and touching. It drips beauty and bleeds authenticity. The most powerful stories are of lived experience, when an author shows you how their world feels, how different and most importantly how similar. The best authors have a way of translating their experience into something that is infinitely and intimately understandable, and Caleb Azumah Nelson is one of them.

I marked many quotes from this book but to avoid spoiling anything I’ll use one from the very first page:


You lost her gaze for a moment and your breath quickened, as when a dropped call across a distance gains unexpected gravity. You would soon learn that love made you worry, but it also made you beautiful. Love made you Black, as in, you were most coloured when in her presence. It was not a cause for concern; one must rejoice! You could be yourselves.


And maybe one more…

What you’re trying to say is that it’s easier for you to hide in your own darkness, than emerge cloaked in your own vulnerability. Not better, but easier. However, the longer you hold it in, the more likely you are to suffocate.
At some point you must breathe.