Jane Lazarre's compelling novel explores America's mixed racial history through the lives of four families whose fates are intertwined across several generations from slavery to the present. Unflinching in its description of the horrors of slavery and racism as well as the taboos on all sides of the racial divide,the novel moves us in the present, and prepares us for the future. Lazarre is unflinching in her depiction of the destructive historical assumptions and taboos on all sides of the color and racial divide. . . .and in her luminous prose, Inheritance becomes an unsettling and necessary meditation on the messiness of America's shared racial heritage in all its quarrelsome parts.