I finished this one last week and I’m still mulling over my thoughts on it. It took me a good few days to read considering it’s just over 200 pages - I found the writing style to be a tad dry, not helped by the lack of quotation marks. It’s weird, sometimes I’ll read a book with no speech marks and have zero trouble with it, and other times it pulls me right out of the story as I have to double back and work out if that was speech or a thought or who was saying what.

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The first half of this book is told from Niru’s perspective, a Black, gay 18-year-old with his sights set on Harvard. It details the struggles he has coming out and the lack of acceptance he faces from his conservative, religious parents. Then we have Meredith, Niru’s white best friend who happens to be in love with him. Meredith is possibly the issue I had getting into the book, I struggled to care about her at all and that is only heightened by later events.

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In the second half, we switch to Meredith’s perspective and the book delves more into racism, police brutality and what it means to be a Black boy in the US, though all framed through Meredith’s white gaze - it’s deliberately infuriating and Meredith’s choices and actions will make you want to throw the book out the window. It packs a huge emotional gut punch but not at all in the way I was expecting it to - which makes it more impactful? At first I was disappointed we didn’t get to explore more of Niru’s queerness and coming out journey but then, isn’t that the whole point? Black lives are cut short every day in America.