Rating: 3

Format: Ebook (ARC - pub date 1/28)

Genre: Historical fiction, Literary fiction

Thank you to Netgalley for an advanced copy. All thoughts are my own.

Charmaine Wilkerson is an undoubtedly skilled writer. This book is ambitious and the overarching themes and ideas of it are captivating, but the execution didn’t resonate with me as much as I hoped it would. I loved the idea of a single heirloom tying a family history together, especially one that is as meaningful as a clay jar crafted by an enslaved potter being passed down through six generations. 

Both the prose and the characterization were excellent in this book, but the pacing and back-and-forth between our modern timeline and the different historical flashbacks to the creation and transportation of the clay jar didn’t work for me. I had a hard time getting into the book initially and the moments I was most invested in Ebby and the conflict in her life were the times we would cut away to hear about Ebby’s ancestors, which we didn’t spend enough time with for me to get invested in their lives outside of The Jar. The ending and resolution of the book also felt quite long.

Still, as someone who has experienced the loss of an older brother, I thought the depiction of complex grief and how losing a child/sibling impacts a family of four was well done. In many ways, it mirrored my own experience, even if I didn’t go through such a violent loss as Ebby did. I appreciated the representation of sibling grief and how that impacted Ebby’s romantic relationships as well. Wilkerson knows her stuff when it comes to writing complex emotional relationships between characters who feel like real people. 

Ultimately, Good Dirt is well written with stunning characters, but its pacing and structure dragged and pulled me out of the narrative.