I jumped into this 2022 release after reading and loving Wilkerson's sophomore novel, Good Dirt. At once a family saga, a sibling story, and historical fiction surrounding a family secret, Black Cake introduces us to the Bennett family. When the matriarch Eleanor Bennett dies, her children inherit a strange legacy: a black cake made from an old family recipe and an audio recording in which Eleanor finally clues her children in to the identity-upending secrets she's been keeping for decades.

In her follow-up to her blockbuster debut Black Cake, Wilkerson again explores grief, trauma, and social justice issues through the lens of one family and its precious heirloom. Ebony “Ebby” Freeman, the twenty-nine-year-old daughter of an affluent Black New England family, suffers a painful and public romantic betrayal in the opening pages. She flees to France to heal but can’t escape the pull to untangle past events—both her recent humiliation and her still-unanswered questions from a trauma she suffered two decades prior. In an alternating timeline, Wilkerson lays out the history of the family’s heirloom stoneware pot and each generation that has possessed it, ever since it was first thrown by an enslaved master craftsman. I couldn’t wait to find out what would happen to Ebby and her ancestors.