Ironic Downfall. Seriously, how much more ironic can you get than a book about citizenship being felled by… *a lack of documentation*????
To be clear, there are *many* more issues with this book. The biggest being that it is marketed as a critical and intellectual examination of the concept of citizenship (which is intriguing and deserves to be written about)… and instead what we actually get is a racist memoir that openly proclaims that the entire concept of citizenship was created whole cloth in the US in the 19th century to keep the brown person down and give the evil white man a way to exclude brown people while claiming to be objective. Seriously.
Now, maybe that last bit is something you tend to agree with. Even there, you should be pissed off at this book because it doesn’t even begin to try to objectively make this case. Further, when you make an extraordinary claim such as what this book proposes, the Sagan Standard applies and extraordinary evidence is expected – yet there is next to no documentation, clocking in at just 8% of the Advance Review Copy that I’ve had for four months before finally reading it just weeks before publication.
All of this noted, it actually was rather intriguing as a personal memoir of one person’s thoughts and experiences on the subject at hand. So yes, *as a personal memoir*, this book works much better than as any form of objective intellectual endeavor, and from the memoir angle it really is a compelling read of one person’s thoughts.
But that’s not what this is being marketed as, at least at this stage. At this stage, it is being marketed as much as a scholarly work as memoir, and as a scholarly work this book utterly fails in every conceivable respect.
Still, read this book as a memoir. Please. Hernandez has a clear and rare voice, and her story needs to be heard. I just wish she had put as much effort into integrating it into an actual objective examination of the topic as she did in expressing how evil the white man is.
Recommended.
This review of Citizenship by Daisy Hernandez was originally written on January 23, 2026.