The Seven Daughters of Dupree by Nikesha Elise Williams | Book Review

[00:00:00]Hi everyone, I'm Rinsy and this is Rinsy Res. Today I'm here to talk about The Seven Daughters of Dupri by Nikisha Elise Williams. This is a book that came out earlier in 2026 and I've had like sort of on my radar ever since I first heard about it. I finally was able to get a copy of it from my library and overall I really enjoyed my experience with this book. This is a multigenerational novel where you are following multiple generations of women in this one family. The story doesn't necessarily go in chronological order.

[00:00:29]you are jumping around in time a bit and there's certain people and story lines that you follow more closely than others. There is the most modern-day story line which is really taking place in the '9s um where you are following Tati who is the like sort of lowest on the line. She is the daughter of Nadia and she has always wondered like who her father is. she's never been able to know like who he is, what happened to him, what happened to him and his mother and all these different things. Um, and then there is her grandmother, Glattis, who also is very tight-lipped about the past and the things that have happened in the family and like the reasons why she moved to Chicago from Alabama. There is Glattis's mother, Ruby, and then Ruby's mother was Jubilee. And you like sort of see like all these generations of women and the things that have happened to them, the traumas that they've gone through and things like that. You know, you see sort of like how generational trauma runs through a family. Um, you see sort of the difficulties that black women have experienced and continue to experience. you see sort of these women who are trying their best to make their lives as good as possible but the you know hurdles that they have to come across and just their own sort of beliefs about what is good and not for them. Um and it's also just about the connections that they all have to each other whether or not they realize it or not. You know, there is this running curse in this family as well where the women in the family are unable to bear sons. If they do have a son or they're pregnant and it is a boy, usually they end up misarrying in some sort of way, whether it's early on or later on in life, like delivering too early and things like that, and the baby doesn't survive. Most of the time, they misaryry pretty early on and bleed pretty heavily, and they're only able to birth children, but birth women, I should say, and usually they only end up having one child. um because of these traumatic events of having major miscarriages and things along those lines. So yeah, that's kind of just like a really highlevel summary of what's going on in this book. Like I said, really enjoyed my experience with this book. I think I gave it around a four out of five stars.

[00:02:39]I had pretty high expectations going into this one because I've heard so many people raving about this book. Um I've had it on my own list for a very long time, very long, for the entirety of this year because it came out pretty early in the year. um and have been eagerly anticipating picking it up. And I will say that like I said, overall really enjoyed. I gave it a four out of five. I I feel like I have such a high bar now for books like this because like two of the comps are like Homegoing, which I is a five-st star book for me. I recommend that book all the time, as well as The Love Songs of Web De Boy, which I also really really love. You know, Homegoing is that sort of like generational story. Love Songs of Web De Boy also has that aspect of it, but I feel like this one is probably closer to that book. The vibes just feel similar in my opinion. Um, so there were like times in this book where I wasn't really ne like feeling some of the perspectives or didn't quite understand what the author was doing yet. Although it does all really come together in the end. But I think that the other thing is that like the women in this book sometimes they really annoyed me. Like I just wanted to shake some of them and be like just talk to each other please and like be honest with each other which that's kind of like the point of this whole book. This book is about sort of trauma and secrets and sort of, you know, what ends up happening when those secrets are like so tightly kept hold of and not like discussed with each other because I feel like in a lot of these situations if people just talk to each other and were honest to about their circumstances or the things that they've gone through with each other, there would be a lot more understanding. You know, there are times where like these daughters are going through difficult things or like traumatic things and like the mothers just like don't have sympathies for their daughters for a variety of reasons. Some of which like I completely not that I am okay with, but I like can kind of understand like based on their own experiences. they've either hardened themselves to the world and to each other and even their own daughters or because like they expected more and better from their own kids. Uh and therefore like that disappointment comes out in ways that are very angry. And so like those sorts of things can be like really like [clears throat] frustrating as a reader because you just want these people to like do better for each other and be there for each other.

[00:04:58]And like I just wanted to be like you get what's happening, you hard-headed people. Just just talk to each other and be empathetic with each other. But I think that also talks a lot about like the power of the story. Like all of these characters felt very real. All of these characters like felt very understandable to those degrees because you are seeing all their different perspectives um and the different things that they've had to go through over the course of their lives. Kudos to the author for creating such like complex and like interesting and like well-rounded characters. Like all of these women, while they are like related to each other, so there are some degrees of like personality traits that are similar to each other, specifically like the stubbornness or the hard-headedness or the, you know, taught ways of like handling things which may or may not be great. Like those things are there, but they are each their own person as well, which you very much see over the course of the book. I do think that sometimes the structure of the book was a slight downside to this book as well. Jump around a lot in timelines, jump around a lot between perspectives. I will admit that like in the beginning I was a little bit confused. if you have like either the physical copy of the book or um like an ebook copy of the book, there's a family tree and I definitely like flip back to that a number of times, especially at the beginning of the book where I still getting to know the characters and trying to understand like where they fell within the family tree because I don't know if that's like necessarily the most clear, especially for like some of the older generations.

[00:06:23]I kept getting confused about like who was whose kid and all of that stuff and like where we were in the timeline like what year it was and things along those lines to kind of understand what was happening. So I can imagine that like if I was listening to this on audio or something along those lines like it might get a little bit confusing. I think it's like one of those things that like in the beginning feels like a lot but then eventually you learn the characters and you figure out their story lines and stuff like that and it gets easier as you continue on. But I can see like those beginning parts like losing people because of that structure in the timelines and things along those lines. I will say like this book has a lot of difficult topics that it talks about as you can imagine with a book that deals with people who were slaves and going through the various discriminatory things that happened in the over the course of the United States and continue to happen. Yeah, some of this is difficult to read, but one of the things I did like about this book is the fact that like the family owns their own land and specifically like the women of this family. You find out pretty early on that someone dies and basically leaves their land to the like first generation of these like daughters and that land stays in the family for the rest of their lives and for like generations and things along those lines. And so like while there are sort of like the quote unquote stereotypical plot points that this book hits, um there's also like this sort of detail that I thought was really nice to see of seeing like um black women, especially in this family owning land, you know, having people working for them, passing this land along, having this inheritance and things along those lines, a place for them to return to and things like that. You don't get to see that quite as much in media. I feel like that was like one aspect that I really appreciated in this book. So yeah, overall if you haven't had this book on your radar and you are a fan of like historical fiction, if you enjoy multigenerational novels, anything along those lines, then I would definitely put this one on your list to check out if you can. So yeah, those are my quick thoughts on The Seven Daughters of Dupri. Let me know down in the comments below if you've read this book, what your thoughts were on it, or if you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave that down in the comment section as well. So yeah, that's all I have for now, and thanks for watching.