It’s kind of like a break. An easy readable Faulkner - mostly. It’s more a boy’s story, giving it a Huck Finn quality, with a black and white bond. The race aspect has serious issues, but also warmth and intimacy within a not very warm environment. These are also nicely plotted novels, with the penultimate story capitalizing on everything before and ramping up the tension and sustaining it. This book is, perhaps, a good introduction to Faulkner. 

Ugh. What a miserable read. Faulkner is not for me.

To be fair, neither is the Confederate-sympathetic view of the Civil War and the owning of other people. I probably shouldn't have bothered to even try reading this stream-of-consciousness racism-choked mess.

The second half-star is for the character Drusilla before she was "beaten". I was briefly delighted that this might have secretly been a pro-trans story, but it turned out to just be another way to beat an independent woman down and brand her with "hysteria".

People have said that Faulkner's work is "difficult" and one must "be patient" in order to understand it. There was nothing difficult about the content of this book - other than the sensation of being trapped listening to a person with ADHD (such as myself) desperately try to finish telling a relatively simple story the most complex way possible which turns out to be incredibly boring and pointless in the end.

There was no enlightenment in this story. No real and honest recognition from the privileged characters that owning others was wrong, that forcing women into lives they don't want and aren't suited to is wrong, and no attempt to undo or right anything. We're meant to feel sympathy for these characters who have everything they have only because they enslaved others to do the work for them, and then lost it.

Yet while they recognize that those they think of as "less than" are smarter, or more clever, or just as strong as them, and are willing to utilize that to their benefit, they still choose to push them down as a whole, kill them rather than let them vote, force them into a loveless marriage rather than let them be themselves.

Finally, we're expected to feel a deep awe that one white guy decides not to kill another white guy for killing a white guy who has killed lots of others—and OMFG I could not care less!

There's no point in indulging the stories of those in the ruling class taking advantage of being in the ruling class, recognizing the literal equality of those "beneath" them, and then continuing to enforce themselves as the ruling class anyway.

This was an utter waste of time. The only benefit I've come out of it with is knowing not to read any more Faulkner.