Now this was just endlessly entertaining. Alternate history liberally sprinkled with jazz, linguistics, power structures, hardboiled detectives and some really neat worldbuilding, that's just a great way to start the reading year. Is it THE most indepth, hard-hitting look at race and class relations in the (OK, a) US? No. But it uses its narrative and the world it creates to create a utopia of what might be without making it all too simple. I'm sure you can ask whether a white Brit is the one who should be telling this story, but it IS a world that never got to be, so nobody's lived in it; just the ones who read this story. And it's a story that keeps finding new stones to turn over. Cue up a good prohibition-era playlist, pour yourself a gimlet and dig in.