There are dozens of ancestors in this well-researched book. At times, too many … We sense that she wants to give all of them their due. But in the process, the reader senses that two of the most crucial figures in her life—her mother and father—remain mysteriously shadowed, only half complete … Straight writes with aching tenderness … From the Sims side of the family, Straight painstakingly researches Henry Ely, a Cherokee who loved two slave sisters in antebellum Tennessee … In the end, Straight’s book is about far more than a country of women. It’s an ode to the entire multiracial, transnational tribe she claims as her own.
