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I wanted to love this book so much more than I did. I deeply admire Baldwin's bravery in tackling the subjects of systemic racism and socially forbidden love, and some of the sentences took my breath away with their beautiful construction. Even so, the book is veined with a deep-seated misogyny. Women here are either weak or "bitches," and either way they seem to want to be slapped around. Ugh. The characters in general feel thin to me, like figures created to drive a plot and propose theories of the world rather than real people taking real action driven by their desire and individual personality. Each seems to speak with the same voice. The shifting point of view didn't help, and at the end, I had no idea whose story this was or what I was supposed to take from it except that love is inflammatory and destructive, a theory I'm not quite willing to buy. In this novel, Baldwin is at his best when writing about the love between men. There is real beauty here, but in the end, for me at least, the novel's beauty wasn't enough to overcome its woman hating.