Would recommend: YES

You must read this book. It is difficult, and it is raw, but it is so important. It's about legacy, history, power, and powerlessness. Ugh. This book gutted me. Here are a couple of lines to demonstrate how:

"I wonder why silence is the sound of our subsumed rage, our accumulated grief."

"My entire community suffered from a lack of trust: we didn't trust society to provide the basics of a good education, safety, access to good jobs, fairness in the justice system. And even as we distrusted the society around us, the culture that cornered us and told us were perpetually less, we distrusted each other. We did not trust our fathers to raise us, to provide for us. Because we trusted nothing, we endeavored to protect ourselves, boys becoming misogynistic and violent, girls turning duplicitous, all of us hopeless."

I would also recommend it to folks who are interested in the area that was affected by Hurricane Katrina. It's not ABOUT the storm, but it helped me understand the context of the storm more.