I appreciate this book’s importance for a younger audience which was after all the goal of the “YA” memoir. The book deals with a variety of topics which are rarely talked about as openly and earnestly as here. Queerness, blackness, sexuality, the realities of life and death. I think it’s an instant addition to the classroom canon. While some of the topics might seem to mature for middle grade (which is who I would recommend this too) as the author notes, not talking about it won’t mean they won’t experience these things as well, in which case it is more important for them to know they aren’t alone.

I think Mark Twain perfectly captions the frustrations of learning a new language. I’m German myself and have experienced moments in my life in which I thought “there is no way I would know how to properly structure this sentence if it hadn’t been ingrained in me from the start”. While I sometimes had to resist the urge to rush to defense of German. It was hard to deny the fact that German is sometimes unnecessarily long winded when on the opposite page of the paragraph I had just read in English the same paragraph in German extends for another couple of lines.

I’m a sucker for forbidden love stories and the romantic in me was constantly hoping for our lovers to defy society and find a happy ending. I adore the fable like writing style and the humorous author’s interceptions.