Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an advanced audio copy of this title in exchange for an honest review.

Ava is a 13 year old Persian girl growing up in Southern California in the 1980s. She's dealing with pressure from her mom to grow up in to a doctor, racism, insecurity, and the growing pains of friendships as you go through puberty.

This title is written in verse and that style definitely suits the story. It makes the story flow, just like a wave. However, the narration for this title was awful. It was overall very staccato and disjointed. There were weird huge gaps between words and it felt stilted and awkward. It could have been a stylistic choice, but I don't think it served the story well.

I feel like the story reflects a lot of important issues and themes that affect everyone as they are growing up, and also include specific issues/themes that affect POC growing up in a predominantly white culture. However, I feel like this book was trying to do too many of those things at once. It brought up so many different issues that it was impossible to truly do all of them justice. The main issue from this story is (spoiler) the fact that her best friend Phoenix is dying of leukemia. This was handled pretty well, but this storyline started to take over the narrative and everything else just fell by the wayside.

I do think this is an important story and I enjoyed reading from the perspective of a Persian middle schooler-- I don't think I have ever read anything with that type of protagonist before. It's so important to see characters who look like you when you're growing up. I'm glad Persian-American girls will have Ava to relate to. I would definitely recommend having those kids read this in the physical format though. I wonder if the reason I didn't like this story as much as I expected to is because I just really hated the audio.