Toni Morrison is one of those authors who have always been on my list, mostly due to the controversy around their books (stupid book banners), but I’ve never gotten around to reading them. Both The Bluest Eye and Beloved were on my The Classics Club list I created back in 2012 and I picked up phyical copies sometime after that.
When Morrison passed in 2019, I told myself I would read her works and it took me this long to get to them thanks to always being distracted and just not making an effort. Both are relatively short so ended up on my Rando Book Selector spreadsheet using randomly generated titles from roughly 60 books to slowly chip away at my TBR pile and The Bluest Eye came up as I was planning for a recent vacation and here we are.
When someone from the publisher reached out to me about Black Cake, it wasn’t an immediate yes or an immediate no.* I honestly had no idea what I was going to do, I thought it was a beautiful cover (even if I didn’t notice the woman on it for ages) and the multi-generational story drew me in.
So I have talked about gut punches when reading books before, but Silvera took it to a different level with this one—and this was his freakin’ debut novel!
What a difference eight-ish years makes between reads. I last read this in 
When I saw this on NetGalley I knew I was going to request it.* I remember the news stories of Bailar joining the Harvard University swim team and being the first trans athlete to compete on any NCAA D1 Men’s team and when I saw he wrote this I knew I wanted to read it.