The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
A young Black woman traces her family history from pre-colonial Africa through slavery to contemporary Georgia. Jeffers's 800-page debut is an epic that insists on the full scope of African American history without flinching. An Oprah's Book Club pick that genuinely deserved the platform.
The complaint that comes up more than any other is length: reviewers say the roughly 816 pages needed a real edit, with individual guesses running from three to five hundred pages that could go, and one reviewer just calls it a “bloated almost 800-page doorstopper.” The padding gets named specifically, long stretches on food, clothing, and parties, plus what one reader dismisses as “stupid conversations in college dorm rooms.” Others land even harder, saying the book runs “at least 500 pages too long.” Ailey herself draws a separate complaint: passive on the page and “not easy to like,” she reads more vividly through other characters' eyes than in her own chapters.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
