I’ve felt like butt all day– my monthly day where my body just shuts down, apparently, and I called in this morning and slept until 2:00– so I don’t really have anything to talk about, but make sure you check out the comments on the previous post, where Wright Thompson himself pops in (!!) to talk about the subtitle on The Barn.
#REVIEW: The Barn, by Wright Thompson
I probably shouldn’t write this tonight. I spent the first hundred pages of this book thinking about putting it down, not because it was bad but because it wasn’t exactly the book I thought it was when I picked it up. I bought this book on sight in Barnes and Noble, and I didn’t know it existed prior to finding it, and I had to flip it over and look at the back to be certain it was about Emmett Till’s murder. There are a lot of barns in Mississippi, and there have been a lot of murders. And the title of the book does not mention Till.
It becomes clear fairly quickly upon starting to read it that The Barn is not only a history of the Till murder. It’s a memoir before anything else, I think, and if it’s a history of anything it’s a history of Mississippi, framed around the young man’s murder and the barn he was killed in. Often when places are mentioned, their distance from the barn is the first thing you find out about them, carefully measured down to the tenth of a mile. “Secret history” makes it sound like it’s going to be digging up long-buried stories, which actually is accurate, but mostly because Mississippi has never been interested in the truth. Mississippi buries history like a fucking professional, you see. Lying about itself is in the state’s blood.
And, well. About that.
Here’s the cover of the UK version of this book:
I literally made this discovery five minutes ago, as I sat down to write this; the first thing I do whenever I’m writing a book review is find a high-res copy of the cover, of course, and … well.
I am surprisingly angry about the title change, and I really want to know which one was the original title. I feel like the UK subtitle has to be the original one; I can see changing the title from that to the more sensationalistic, less specific US version despite how fucking awful a decision I think it was, but altering the title from the US version, especially the way the cover emphasizes Till’s name, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like the average British citizen, or even the average British reader of nonfiction about America, probably doesn’t know who Emmett Till is? Or, at the very least, his name has significantly less salience over there than it does here? I could be wrong, I suppose, and it might be worth pointing out that we have one cover that does not mention Till and one cover that does not mention Mississippi. And, again, this book is more about Mississippi than it is about Emmett Till.
I’ll do some digging tomorrow and see if I can find out the story of the title change. It’s 2026; maybe Wright Thompson is on Bluesky. You never know.
One way or another, once I got out of my own head and started judging the book for what it was, rather than what I thought it was going to be, it’s a phenomenal piece of work, and even if the title was changed for the most base and cowardly reasons– and, Christ, the title of a book about Emmett Till getting changed to omit Till’s name is the most Mississippi thing that could possibly have happened– I can’t blame the book for that. And the third section of the book, called 1955, tells the story of the murder well enough. I don’t know that there’s enough in a straight history to fill 400 pages, but the way Thompson weaves hundreds of years of Mississippi and US history around the events of a single night in a crumbling barn in a shithole town in the middle of nowhere makes it an impressively hard book to put down. The research that went into this book is detailed and exacting, the prose soars, and I sat down and tore through the last 170 pages in one sitting immediately after finishing dinner tonight. This is one of the best nonfiction books I’ve read this year. You should read it.
Nope
Far too fucking crabby to expose other humans to my nonsense tonight. Starting a book about Emmett Till and then doing my mandatory child abuse training tonight may have been a bit too much for a Sunday night.
Scammers make no sense at all
I always have the weird urge to fuck with people whenever I get a wrong number text message, and this was waiting for me when I got out of the shower earlier today. I almost responded with the literally true “No, I just got out of the shower” to that first message, and then decided I wasn’t in the mood to troll a stranger and just played it straight, expecting either no response or a quick apology and then radio silence. Instead, I got this interaction, which just gets weirder with every message.
Why did you send Emma a selfie of you already at the gym?
Why did you ask me to confirm I wasn’t Emma, when I’d already told you twice? Was there a chance that I was going to turn out to be wrong, and realize I had been Emma all along?
What’s the deal with “work” coming through as “wr ok” both times? And “numbver” twice?
And I made sure to include the timestamps on the rest of the messages, because the timing was so weird. There’s an hour between “How should I address you?” and “You haven’t answered my question,” and then another 40 minutes between that and Emma showing up, nearly two hours after the original message. Nothing about this interaction feels normal at all, which makes me feel like it has to be a prelude to a scam, but this is not the first time that I’ve felt like I was on the path to being scammed by someone and, bewilderingly, never actually got to the part where the scamming happened.
(Follow-up to that story: I did eventually get a response from the real editor on LinkedIn confirming that no, that message was not from her, and I got a whole different message from a different scammer a few weeks later which I replied to with total credulity, hoping something fun would happen. No response to that one either.)
Anyway, I dunno. Maybe Mia’s older than she looks and English isn’t her first language and she’s maybe friendlier than she ought to be and that’s why everything feels so off, but I kept waiting for the part where she hits me up for $500 for a picture of her tits or something, and instead it just sorta trailed off. If anybody has a good idea about what the hell was going on here, or wants to try to convince me that this was a normal interaction that I’m reading too much into, feel free.
#REVIEW: My Sister, the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite
An interesting thing happened while I was thinking about reviewing this book: I popped over to Goodreads, saw my review, and knocked it down a star. Don’t misunderstand me; that change was from five stars to four, and this is still a book I enjoyed reading and can recommend to people. But if you’re going to read something by Oyinkan Braithwaite, and you should, you ought to start with Cursed Daughters, which I can be much more enthusiastic about.
MStSK begins on the floor in a bathroom, as our main character Korede uses bleach to remove the blood of her sister’s murdered boyfriend. Her sister, Ayoola, is perching on the toilet, blood drying on her body, as she waits for her sister to remove the evidence of her kill. Later, the two of them will dump the body off of a bridge into a lagoon below, hoping the local wildlife gets to it before anyone finds it.
(There are going to be some spoilers, more than I usually have in a review, so be aware of that. The tl;dr of the rest of the review is that I think this book would have been better if it had more room to breathe, and I don’t think it lived up to its own promise. It’s not a bad book, it’s just a distinct step down from Daughters.)
It is, as it turns out, the third boyfriend Ayoola has murdered, and the third Korede has helped her dispose of. Strangely, the police don’t seem to have noticed any sort of pattern, although Braithwaite is quick to emphasize how easily bribed and incompetent Nigerian police are. Ayoola is eventually questioned about this current boyfriend’s disappearance, but the body is never found and she’s never in any serious danger of arrest. And we don’t really get any details about the previous killings.
Here’s the thing: I read this in a couple of big gulps (and it’s short, so you probably will too) and in the moment it was a fun and interesting read. And it’s still a fun and interesting read, but it’s one of those books where a couple of days later the holes are going to start to show. Ayoola is younger and prettier than Korede, and has much better luck with men, and Korede is the more studious and responsible one as well. And eventually Ayoola meets the hot doctor that Korede has a crush on at her job (she’s a nurse; Ayoola is unemployed) and of course he falls for her, and this is supposed to be where the big emotional crux of the novel is, as Korede tries to decide what to do about the whole situation, but it just sort of fizzles. Ayoola temporarily abandons the doctor to fuck off to Dubai with another guy, this one married, and he somehow dies of either food poisoning or a drug overdose while they’re gone, a story Korede immediately doubts, and eventually she tries to stab the doctor but he ends up stabbing her himself in self-defense. Then Ayoola finds another man, and the book ends as Korede comes down the stairs in their home to meet him.
That sounds worse than it is, partially because I’m still in the bad mood I’ve been in all week, but I think the main problem with this book is missed potential. It’s about 220 pages long, and I think it could have used another thirty or so at least, and another hundred pages wouldn’t have been a problem. There’s a lot of backstory spent on Ayoola and Korede’s deceased (and abusive) father, and a side plot about a man in a coma who Korede has been caring for and using as her own private confessional, who wakes up and remembers more of what she told him than she expected. He wakes up and decides he’s in love with Korede, divorces his wife, and sort of hints around that he’s willing to hold what he knows over her head, but it doesn’t end up going anywhere.
So, yeah. Read more Nigerian fiction. Read Braithwaite. Just don’t start with this one.
In which my job is impossible
This isn’t the usual rant, although I’m pretty sure after 5,485 posts over the last thirteen-plus years, I’ve probably written it before. I locked grades for the first quarter today, and in keeping with previous practice today’s classes were given over to test retakes and missing work, or for doing nothing if you were satisfied with your grade.
Y’all, I only had twelve kids fail my class this quarter. That’s out of a hundred and thirty-four. That’s 8.9 percent. Thirty-two in my regular Math class are getting an A, plus seventeen more in my Algebra and Math lab classes. 36.5%.
I gotta admit, that number feels too high, although it’s skewed by my other two classes being Algebra and a Math Lab class that nonetheless is full of Algebra students. But even my regular Math classes managed 29.6% getting an A. That’s crazy.
To put this in perspective, I have had plenty of individual classes where more than 12 kids were failing. Typically if it’s below fifteen percent I feel okay about it. I really want to go back over the last few years and compare my grades during first quarter to see if I’m just remembering wrong.
So, what am I doing right now? Congratulating myself on, at the least, motivating more kids to get their work done, because it’s not like there’s anything I can do if they choose to do nothing? Marveling at how my command of my craft means that my kids are really learning this year, and that’s the reason grades are up?
Nah, of course not; I’m trying to figure out where I’ve gotten easier and lazier about grading. There is no good news in my goblin brain, and there are a million ways to take anything that looks like good news and turn it into bad news.
Tomorrow, I get to remind everyone that grades are starting over, and because of that when half of them don’t turn in their assignment tomorrow, that half will wake up on Saturday morning and find out they’re failing Math. I’m also super psyched about the way the good news is only going to last for about a day.
Well FINE
No book reviews for you, you bums!
Which is fine, honestly, because I’m just as crabby tonight as I have been all week, and I’m completely convinced that tomorrow is going to be annoying. I want to gripe about how my kids shat the bed on a test again today, but they didn’t, really; the average for everybody is a C, which is right about what you’d expect, and had I given it three weeks ago it would have been about a 10%, so I have actual evidence that learning happened. Just not, like, evenly. Which is the perennial gripe of my job.
They aren’t allowed to talk to me at all tomorrow, by the way. I’m handing each kid a piece of duct tape or a stapler, their choice, when they walk into the room. Here is your progress report. You have until 3:20 to fix it. Go away.
Choose your own book review
Since reading “Threshing Day,” I have finished four books. That’s not as ridiculous as it sounds; they’re all really short. That said, let me know if you want to see any reviews of these, since I’ve got a bit of choice paralysis going on right now:
I only just started Nicked tonight, but it’s about stealing St. Nicholas’ corpse, and it’s already sent me scurrying to Wikipedia to check a historical claim which turned out to be true. It’s only 220 pages, though, so I’ll finish it just as quickly as the others. The short version is that I enjoyed all of them, but let me know if you want more details.