Wow! This was quite a story! It was a fairly quick and easy read but drew me in the further along I got. At first, I didn’t really ‘like’ any of the characters (except, of course, for Briar) but I grew to like Emira the best of the main characters.
It did seem a bit heavily written in the way that EVERY SINGLE STEREOTYPE was included, but that is what gave the book its power and pop. You couldn’t help but see yourself and mistakes you had made, others, real life situations, in so much of it. Each character encapsulated problematic characteristics of racism... some more overt than others.
I read in a review of this book that it was good at depicting ‘negative space’ which means the space between what we intend to happen and the consequences of our actual actions. That makes a lot of sense to me. Between what someones ‘means’ and and how it is actually ‘perceived’. The author did a really good job of depicting that - from both perspectives and among all the characters.
This is not a great book because I loved the characters and the resolution. It is a really good book because it depicts so well the inner workings, thoughts and motivations of 3 different people and how their interactions fuel it all.
Lines I highlighted in this book...
A text message from Laney was waiting on her phone. Is it okay if Ramona and Suzanne swing by with me tonight? They have girls too and they’re completely lovely. Feel free to tell me no if you just want one-on-one time! Alix rubbed the back of her neck and thought, Jesus fucking Christ. With both hands she texted, The more the merrier!
It’s like eating everything on your plate ’cause you think someone else won’t go hungry if you don’t. You’re not helping anyone but yourself.
“It completely fetishizes black people in a terrible way,” Tamra went on. “It makes it seem like we’re all the same, as if we can’t contain multitudes of personalities and traits and differences. And people like that think that it says something good about them, that they’re so brave and unique that they would even dare to date black women. Like they’re some kind of martyr.”
This was a video about racism that you could watch without seeing any blood or ruining the rest of your day.
This was a video about racism that you could watch without seeing any blood or ruining the rest of your day.
Believing that Kelley was the starting point of her adversity would always be easier than believing she’d simply slipped through an unlucky crack. This choice to believe otherwise, to pretend there weren’t coffee-colored letters pressed into her chest, would keep her close to him, even if staying close to Kelley meant holding a grudge for something that he never did.
I gave this book 4 stars out of 5. Zoom Reading Circle gave it 3.8.
Emira was a likable character mostly - I liked her more and more as the book went on. She was struggling to find herself and wanted to ‘adult’ while all her friends were moving on. That is a hard thing. I can get that. She truly loved and cared for Briar and was that poor little girls best lifeline. To me the greatest tragedy of the book is that Briar would no longer have Emira in her life (and vice versa). Emira is someone you do root for and hope she will be ‘okay’.
Kelley weirded me out. That scene on the subway where he talks about Emira being his girlfriend and they have this game where they pretend to not be was strange. He is a control freak who is out to prove how cool and ‘woke’ he is. At the expense of other humans! Creepy. He may have grown into believing his schtick by his later years, but he was a weirdo for sure.
Peter was nice but not really a focus. Hope he loves Briar.
Key points from other reviews
Alix - entitlement and saviorism. But also, I would say, narcissism. And a bit of a send up of a rich white ‘woke’ woman from New York (probably quite accurate...) Incredible at the end that we discover that Kelley hadn’t actually shared that awful letter but that she had decided to ‘continue with the narrative that best helped her’ for all those years, including in a face to face confrontation with Kelley himself? Wow! Nutso! Agree with another review I read that said they would have liked to read something from the perspective of another character - Zara. True!
