Books like this lay bare a lot of uncomfortable truths. It takes a skilled author to handle these truths and the fallout from everything involved. Sawyerr is one such author. My words pale in comparison to the actual narrative so I will direct you there. I highly recommend this book.
I really appreciated this narrative and the authentic story it told. The main character recently lost his brother to a tragic car accident. His family still deals with that raw grief while also trying to move forward. He also has spent the summer pushing himself to the limit in basketball training to try to make the varsity team as a sophomore. The narrative focuses primarily on the basketball while also weaving in the micro and macro
aggressions they face along with “normal” teenage problems such as liking a girl who ends up with one of his friend. Although this book did not hit the sweet spot for me, I still recommend it, particularly to young upper middle school and lower high school age boys who so often do not see themselves represented.
[Disclaimer: I wrote this review two weeks after reading the book. Also, I listened to the audiobook on the drive home after a really early morning flight.]
Stone crammed quite a bit into this relatively short novel and did a really good job with it. Both of the main characters are flawed and have significant struggles which stone makes the reader care deeply about in a way where the reader wants so much to help them while
learning what they really need. This book is hard hitting and impactful.
I imagined that this book would have impacted me more than it did but for some reason I struggled to connect with the narrative. In this story, the main character, Lamb, encounters a girl at the doctor’s office who immediately latches onto Lamb due to shared interest in a novel that Lamb had with her. There’s a big problem with that though. In the 1930s Jim Crow South a white girl and a black girl like Lamb were not supposed to
be friends. Lamb tries to distance herself from this girl but a series of events leads to a tragic outcome. If Cline-Ransome had limited the perspectives, I think the story would have worked much better for me. Unfortunately, the narrative included a variety of side perspectives that ended up creating space between me as a reader from the main character. This is a needed story so I will still recommend it; it just didn’t work that well for me.
This book was creepy in just the right way. Although frequently categorized as fantasy, I would argue that it leans far more to magical realism with a hint of horror as well as murder mystery. I found myself quickly sucked into this narrative set in small town Appalachia. The main character, Linden, went missing for about 24 hours exactly a year before the story starts. Even though she came home safe, whispers abound, especially
since the women in her family have always been associated with things that verge on witchy. Then another girl goes missing on the anniversary of Linden’s disappearance and turns up, a couple days later, dead. Linden tries to fit together all these jagged pieces and ends up uncovering something far bigger than she could ever imagine.
In this book we have the first significant dud of this list. While I can see why many may have loved or enjoyed it, the book did not work at all for me. In this narrative, the main character, Adina, has just graduated from a prestigious private high school and should be heading to Yale in the fall but her world fell apart due to revenge of a white, wealthy supposed friend. (That part never gets adequately explained in my opinion. Now
desperate, Adina seeks out the scion of a wealthy family, the Remingtons, to participate in a contest of sorts that the family holds every year in which the winner gets basically anything she could ever want. Unfortunately, this game has a dark side that comes out every time an heir of the family graduates high school, a dark side that becomes deadly. Once that is revealed, I tried to but could not suspend my disbelief. Supposedly, at leas three times before, 11 daughters of influential families entered this contest and were never seen again and no one said anything? Yes, wealth can often cover things up but … . I powered through only because the book was on the list and I had already read half of the book by the time things became exceptionally absurd.