The best I’ve read about this period in San Francisco to date, but it seems like the passage of time and expanding to book length diluted the bite of the n 1 essay

Isn’t this at least one definition of happiness, I thought, to be anticipated?

So, after visiting the graves of his mother and father and his big brother Madison, Robert decided to walk into a diner that used to be only for white people. It was a place he could only have dreamed of entering as a young man. He sat down without incident, ordered and ate, and nobody commented on it one way or the other. It was nothing special and, in fact, underwhelming after all those years of being denied entrance and dreaming of being inside.

Five stars minus one for literally taking a decade to finish

Starts out slow but it picks up. Worth reading just because it draws from so much outside of standard SFF.

"When you are twenty-three years old, there are moments when your life is just a film."