This review was originally posted on Rachel Reading. For 100+ more like this, check it out.

If anyone ever asks me what the hardest book I've ever read was, it would be this one. I read this right after finishing "The Hate U Give", and man. That was hard. It was hard to go from the fictional to the actual real, and to read a love letter from two parents to their son who was taken from us far too young. Trayvon would have turned 23 this year, and my heart just shatters.

This book follows Trayvon's short life, as told by his parents, and the aftermath of his death. Tracy and Sybrina discuss the injustices that were given to them right off the bat from the police (like demanding a drug test on Trayvon's body but not even testing his murderer). The proof that his murderer did actively seek him out, the heartbreaking recollection that Tracy shares where he said he always told Trayvon to run if he was in a situation like the one he was in. We find out why Trayvon was where he was, he was visiting his father, and we listen to these parents process this terrible loss and tragedy.

The most beautiful thing I think about this story is that to me, it felt like bearing a loss of a close friend, our goal is to listen. So often in memoirs I feel like we want to learn, and while that's prevalent here, it's less about us, and more about them. About understanding what these parents went through, and with brutal and sharp honesty, we hear from Sybrina and Tracy as they seem to process. I wrote a full blog post response to this book which you can find here, which is more of an immediate reaction to my sadness about this book.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, should read this book. It will be hard, and that's okay. It should be hard to hear about the murder of a young boy.