Saturday Review: “Inheriting Emotional Repression: Love, Loss, and Legacy,” a review by Sterling Neill of Terah Shelton Harris’s Long After We Are Gone in NCLR Online Spring 2026
Sterling Neill reviews Terah Shelton Harris’s novel, “inspired by the real story of Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels of North Carolina, African American brothers who were jailed for eight years for refusing to leave land purchased by their great-grandfather in Carteret County, NC,….” The novel “critiques the systemic structures that reinforce the legal yet unjust land acquisition or heir property laws that continue to protect the wealthy and neglect the impoverished.”
Neill praises Harris’s use of multiple perspectives throughout the novel “creating a lenticular-lensed story that focuses on the characters’ personal lives and their collective struggle of trying to prevent the legal pilfering of their two-hundred-acre ancestral land.” Neill acknowledges that each character, while having their own personality and story, shares one thing in common: emotional suppression learned through generational traumas. However, this is worked on throughout the novel and Neill states, “Ultimately, the complexity of realistic characters, fluctuating perspectives, and plot structure provide a powerful representation of Black strength and resilience.”
Read the entire review here and purchase a copy of Long After We Are Gone from Bookshop.org* or your local independent bookstore.
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