CW: grief, cheating, car accident (graphic, on-page, in detail), death, homophobia, Islamophobia, underage drinking, alcohol, drug use - characters smoke weed (on-page), fatphobia and fatphobic comments from Rana's mother; absent father, Tupac's death mentioned (on-page); mention of antidepressants in a negative connotation as a character doesn't talk them and it leads to a bad situation; panic attack on page.

What a hidden gem!!! Set in 1996, Rana Joon is a lesbian Iranian-American teenage girl living in SoCal. She loves Tupac and writing poetry. When her best friend Louie unexpectedly passes away in a car accident, she starts her grief journey where she learns there were many things she didn't know about Louie. To honor him, she decides to enter a rap battle he would've participated in. She learns to enjoy writing her own poems and gains confidence as she is petrified of public speaking. This is a messy, fierce girl who finds herself learning about family secret's and stepping up to her strict father who lives in Iran while defying gender norms. 

This book is MESSY but so is grief! I really enjoyed this and highly recommend it, but please be advised of the content warnings because this is not a light book by any means. 

One critique I have is I didn't like the scene of her love interest telling her to "live her truth" and come out to her family while knowing it might not have been safe for her to do so. The coming out scene is not horrible, but her mother does gets upset and shuts her out for about a week. Luckily, she eventually comes around. 

Boring, not my thing!

That shit hurted… 

This was fine. Personally, I think it was too rushed. I liked the conflict added to save the bakery and Layla's brother changing his holiday plans. However, this is set in an Italian bakery in Philadelphia and as a fellow Italian-American from Philly, this didn't feel much like an Italian bakery. They sold cakes, cupcakes and cookies. But there was more of an emphasis and scenes where they're decorating cakes and cupcakes. I wish there had been more detail to incorporate Italian pastries, atleast cannolis were briefly mentioned. I did enjoy Destiny's storyline being a young, budding baker and her joy was infectious. I really liked her as a character!

The romance was sooo rushed! Paige and Layla dated for over four years but things got complicated when they had to be long-distance during their college years. The book states "Trust had been broken, words said that couldn't be taken back" and that's pretty much everything we know about the break-up. 

There's also a scene where Layla receives a box with Paige's old letters and memories from their relationship that is so unnecessary because

Paige says it wasn't her and must've been her mom who sent it.

Then, Paige confesses she wants to get back together and they just get back together!?!?!

I wish the plot point about the breakup had been more fleshed out because I was not rooting for this couple to get back together knowing they had barely addressed the cause of their breakup.

Thus, the end really bothered me because Layla

decides she's back to Baltimore with Paige for grad school to continue her pursuit of becoming a writer

. Last, Paige proposes to Layla at the very end. This all happened in the same year and few days.

I'd prefer to have had some flashbacks where we see these scenes more spaced out because the characters made a lot of big decisions very quickly and it irked me.