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Weight of Blood: 05/16/24

Weight of Blood

The Weight of Blood by Tiffany D. Jackson (2022) is a modern day retelling of Stephen King's Carrie (1974). Maddy Washington is a light skinned biracial teenager in a small North Carolina town that still has two proms decades after desegregation.

Told in a mixture of first hand accounts and more traditional narrative, Maddy Washington's life and horrific act is revealed, layer by layer. From the very first pages the reader is told that "Maddy did it." Further more, the full extent of what happened is laid bare at the beginning.

What makes this book such a compelling page turner is the way Jackson peels back each layer to show the over powered ingénue who is now remembered as the monster who destroyed a town and nearly every one in it.

There is so much nuance and pathos in this telling that is missing from the original. The writing is raw and emotional because it's now built on a foundation of systematic white supremacism to explain the actions of Maddy's tormenters and the adults who failed her.

And then just as things are wrapping up and one thinks they understand Maddy and what has happened to her and the town, Jackson works in one last twist. One last detail to remove Maddy's power from the usual explanation in this sort of story. That one last change is the final twist of the knife. It turns the last monstrous character into an almost sympathetic one. At least it makes his actions understandable beyond just "because racism."

Since it's been almost forty years since I read the novel that inspired The Weight of Blood, I plan to re-read it so I can do a deeper dive into both books.

Five stars

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