Five Carat Soul is a very fun and enjoyable read. I personally don't read much, but this book definitely makes me want to start reading again. This collection of stories by James McBride really had me hooked with his funny, sarcastic, yet serious and thought writing style, and the more you read the better it gets.

I liked most of the stories in this collection with the exception of one of them: Mr. P and The Wind. Mr. P and the Wind is a story about a zoo full of animals and how they go about their day to day things, until it all changes when Mr. P gets to the zoo. I’m still not exactly sure why I didn’t like it, but I have a few guesses. First off, every animal had like 3 different names, which made the whole story confusing. I also couldn’t understand how the animals’ communication process worked. The whole idea of thought speech and how that worked really didn’t fit well with the story. Other than that, the story was ok, but still just too confusing.

Now that we have the negatives out of the way, I’m going to talk about some of the stories that I most liked about this collection. I thought Father Abe was a thought-provoking story that had a simple takeaway from it: What exactly is freedom? Another story I enjoyed from Five Carat Soul was The Christmas Dance. This one has a little bit of everything, from war, to love, to even a bit of detective work. But there was one book that really stood out to me was The Moaning Bench. McBride just puts a perfect few scenes in your head that really make you have a clear picture of the events. I also thought that the character arcs of both of the main characters, The Gatekeeper and Rachmann, where very well done and had done more than I expected.

All in all, I really enjoyed Five Carat Soul. While It had a dud of an ending, I really enjoyed the rest of what it had to offer. I'll give this a 4.5 out of 5