Four star review, originally posted here on July 4th, 2025.
This book’s subject matter was interesting, and the author did a decent job explaining it. I certainly learned a lot. It definitely wasn’t perfect, though. Whenever we were talking about the books themselves and staying on track, this book shined. We learned about who did create these books, who was rumored to have created them but likely wasn’t, whose skin was used, whose skin was rumored to have been used but wasn’t, etc. And, of course, throughout the entire thing, we contemplated the ethics of both the book creation, but also how these books should be handled in the present day.
Most negative reviews I’ve seen focus on Rosenbloom’s opinion that there’s value in displaying the books. People find that opinion troubling (which is fine), but I don’t think that is an appropriate reason to dismiss the entire book. She is not one-sided in her presentation of these ethical concerns; indeed she devotes plenty of time discussing them from several viewpoints. And she also devotes plenty of time to discussing the immorality of the book creation in the first place. Whether or not you agree with her opinion (which she is not shy in expressing) should not devalue the rest of the material.
My only critique of the books itself is that there wasn’t really enough material for a complete book here, and at times I felt that Rosenbloom was stretching things a bit thin. But it wasn’t extreme enough for me to dislike the book entirely.
My only BIG critique is for the audiobook. The narrator was great 95% of the time, and I’m sure she’s fantastic at novels. But she absolutely should NOT have been doing voices for the quotations and dialogue!!!!!! BIG NO NO! I had read a review about this going in and thought, “Oh no, she’s going to be racist at some point…” No, that’s not it. She did terrible over-the-top voices for EVERYBODY. Every single non-American got a ridiculous accent. She added inflections that colored the meaning of the text, which is not fair to the source material. At best is was distracting and cheesy. But at worst, it modified the meaning of quotations in a way that is disingenuous and unfair. I in particular was not a fan of an early section where we’re reading comments left online by people who opposed the display of human remains. The comment was very well-argued and seemed perfectly level-headed and intelligent. Yet the narrator gave the commenter a mocking tone. That was completely uncalled for. Boo hiss.
Helga without the H 