"your black is not my black" and "your weird is not my weird" and "your beautiful is not my beautiful," and that's okay.

Rating: 4 stars.

Full review on my blog as of 06/12/19

Before I get into this review properly, I want to put in the caveat that this book wasn't written for me. I'm an English white woman from a reasonably privileged family, I can't know what it's like to be a black teenager in America so I won’t pretend that I can understand a lot of the cultural nuance in this book. That being said, I still found this book to be super engaging and very accessible.

I think this book is important on so many levels. It's unapologetic in the way it celebrates blackness and black identity, and it also handles the difficulties of relationships at seventeen so well. It shows her struggling with her boyfriend's opinions differing to hers, it shows her handling her family's expectations of her, and it shows her handling the world's expectations of her as a black woman. There were dialogues in this book that I might not personally agree with but I fully believe that all of them are super important and that this book is a love letter to young black women who want to challenge the world they're living in.

I also particularly loved the way that Brittney Morris called out not just the racism that POC face on a daily basis, but also the racism that can exist within POC communities. Keira is torn between being not white enough and not black enough, and has to find her own identity and how she relates to her culture. There's a twist in the book that I think is really well done. I was surprised but also felt really vindicated for some of my earlier misgivings about certain plot points, and the moral lesson of this book ended up being impressively lightly-handled for a heavy topic and didn't drag the book down from it's pop-culture packed, fast-paced tone.