Do you remember that feeling when you were a kid and you would read a book that was too old for you in some way? Where you didn’t fully know why it was upsetting you, but you had that icky feeling where you just wanted to be away from the book? Did y’all experience that as kids? My memory of that feeling is why I feel so confident in kids’ ability to self-censor, so I hope it’s at least somewhat universal.

Anyway, I am a grown-up now, so I mostly don’t feel that feeling anymore. When I feel it now, it’s very often because a book starts leading up to predatory sexual practices. (At least, the last two books that gave me this feeling did it by leading up to predatory sexual practices.) Flood of Fire made me feel that way. (Lolita didn’t, but I was, of course, forewarned.) In the end, nothing as bad as what I was imagining happened, but the feeling lingered.

To be more specific, and a bit spoilery for some things that happen in the middle of the book: A white lady becomes overinterested in the onanistic tendencies of a mixed-race man in her employment and keeps asking him to come to her bedroom to discuss, you know, that. And that is a situation so fraught with badness that if it hadn’t been a book I’ve anticipated for years, I’d have stopped reading.

As with the rest of the series, though, Flood of Fire is kaleidoscopic in scope and more vivid than any other historical novel I’ve read. The people from the Ibis come back together in unexpected and tragic and joyful ways, and that was immensely satisfying. But I’ll probably reread the first two oftener.

Did you have that feeling ever, when you were a kid reading books? Have any of those books stuck with you?

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