Full review available August 10: https://inkandplasma.wordpress.com/2020/08/10/the-black-kids-by-christina-hammonds-reed-review/

Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the eARC of this book, it hasn't affected my honest opinions.

Trigger Warnings: police brutality, suicide, protests, rioting, arson.

Note: I am not a Black reviewer, and requesting this without checking that ownvoices reviewers were also getting copies was wrong of me. For each of the BIPOC books I requested in the last few months without checking they were also being distributed to ownvoices, I will be donating the RRP of each book to a Black Lives Matter associated charity, and in future I will do better. Be sure to sign petitions and donate through here, a BLM carrd (https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/)

It took me a little while to get into this book, but that’s probably just because it’s got a strong contemporary feel to it and that’s not my favourite genre. In saying that, once I got into this book, I was completely hooked on it. I was expecting the trial and the protests that fired up as a response to the LAPD officers getting acquitted to be the main plot of this book, but actually it felt much more like a coming of age story where Ashley, the main character, was finding herself and where she fits into her communities. Ashley is a hell of a protagonist, and I loved how well-written and real she was.

For someone who doesn’t read a lot of coming-of-age stories, I absolutely adored this one. I felt intensely emotionally attached to Ashley and her journey as she struggled with the explosive racial tensions in her community, and found herself torn between feeling ‘not Black enough’ for her community and ‘not white enough’ for her schoolmates. As a white reader I could never begin to imagine what it feels like to be torn in your own identity like that, but Christina Hammonds Reed does an incredible job of portraying the conflict and uncertainty in Ashley in a way that made my heart hurt. The setting itself was incredibly vivid and I loved the descriptions in this book. I felt at several points like I was walking down the streets alongside Ashley because they were so well described and the time period was so distinct.

Ashley’s ‘friends’ were deeply dislikable. I hated the way they treated her and the microaggressions that she suffered, particularly in moments when they acknowledged that she would be treated worse than them because she’s Black without seeming to care that their behaviour enabled it, and even joking about it at times. It was eye-opening to me to see so many little comments from Ashley’s perspective, and definitely made me think about how I can better challenge those so-called ‘harmless’ comments that aren’t harmless at all.

I adored the way this book handled Ashley’s family relationships, and how they were impacted differently by the protests. The scenes where the whole family were together were raw and real and I loved each member of her family – particularly their flawed and loving relationships. Reading about the protests was exactly as heart-breaking and enraging as I expected, knowing that thirty years later, the exact same fight is still being fought in Black neighbourhoods policed by white cops who get away with brutalising Black people under the guise of ‘protecting’.