I’m also a millennial, about a year off from Gladstone’s age, so I get that this is a very personal and heartfelt outpouring of his feelings about Black Lives Matter, flowing from having been through the Occupy protests and electing Obama and feeling like maybe we’d done things right but then nothing was fixed and things stayed dark. I get that. 

But I also wish a brave editor had been willing to cut like…30% off the long internal monologues of each of the characters. There’s a lot that’s good in this book, and a lot of wonderful ideas and images, but… it’s so bogged down and repetitive that it’s hard to enjoy the ride.