Do you ever read a book that you dislike so much you don't even want to put forth the effort into explaining why you dislike it? That was this book for me. I've put off writing this book for days because I already read the damn thing. Now I have to think about it?

For a book about racism, this white author really likes to keep everything neat and tidy with clear cut bad guys and a lot of well meaning white people. It seemed very poorly done to me. But other people with more experience than I have written much more in depth reviews (easily found if you're scanning through the reviews here), so I'll leave it at that. I do want to share a quote I saw that so perfectly captured my feelings:

"It provides the same frustration one feels at Thanksgiving, when your self-described open-minded aunt won’t shut up about the beautiful gay couple she waves to at the gym."

The characters were flat. Pretty sure she dumped having well rounded characters in favor of jamming themes down your throat constantly. Like explicitly lecturing the reader in the narration of the story. It happened frequently. Regardless of whether I agree with those thoughts or not, it's not the way you write a good story. If you want to preach, write a sermon.

I didn't like the first person plural perspective in this. It's very similar to the style of Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides, but without the beautiful writing. It didn't work for me here. It felt so jarring. At times we lose that perspective and it goes into third person and you get the inner thoughts of Xavier or Juniper or whoever, and then halfway through a paragraph it'd switch right back to the "we" of the neighborhood. It felt awkward every time.

It was also just really pretentious. This probably goes with the jamming her themes down your throat every chance she got, but god this was pretentious. I'm normally not one to complain about pretension because I like books with flowery writing and heavy themes and writers who act smarter than they are. Like nine times out of ten, that's my preferred book. But this was painful.

I don't recommend. If you love it, more power to you. But this whole experience felt like suffering to me and describing my thoughts here is just prolonging it.

(I got this as an ARC; here's my honest thoughts)