nannah
Written on Jun 17, 2017
I received this book by winning a diverse book giveaway maybe a couple years ago, and I'm not sure why it took me so long to read it. Unfortunately, it wasn't as good as I'd hoped it would be. And . . . it's painfully obvious that this book (about a black girl--and sometimes about her experience being black raised by two white parents) was written by a white woman. Google searching Michelle Reed and seeing that she's white was absolutely not a surprise at all.
Other things in this book was handled with that similar detachedness (that shouldn't have been) that makes it seem as if she either 1). hadn't gone through those experiences at all or 2). didn't research enough about them or simply didn't care. It's especially frustrating when you as a reader have gone through some of those traumatic experiences just to see them handled so carelessly.
But anyway!
Book content warnings:
rape mention
suicide
domestic abuse
child abuse
pedophilia
(I hope I'm not forgetting any . . . )
Seventeen-year-old Desiree (Dez) has just found herself in a purgatory of sorts after crashing into a semi. Because she had such a violent death at such a young age, she needs to work through some things before she can get her ticket to "move on" to the afterlife. Till then she's stuck in some dormitory with strict rules and schedules she really doesn't want to stick by, and a beautiful city outside she's forbidden to see. Of course, that just makes it all the more enticing.
This is perhaps the most drama-filled book I've ever read. People are falling in love after meeting and knowing each other one day, the amount of fights and spats are countless and pointless, and I'm just so fed up with these characters. I couldn't pick out one of them that I really liked, only some that weren't as annoying. That's . . . not so good.
Plus, the names in this book are unbearable: Dez is the black girl. Then there's Bobby, Charlie, Abbey, Mary, Anne, etc. I'm sorry; this is personal preference, but (shudder).
Bobby is, by far, the most awfully-characterized person in the book. I can't tell if Michelle Reed was trying to make him autistic (and if she was, shame! as an autistic person, that would be terrible). Bobby was a child genius before he died at age eighteen. In his purgatory he's convinced he's still alive and on life support in some hospital, and everything is somehow the making of his own subconscious. He's been dead in the "real world" for eighteen years. Yet somehow, he speaks as someone who's from the 1800s. As if that's what people with high IQs are like ? I wish I'd saved some dialogue from Bobby to show here. I know some of his worst phrases were like "'Yes, that was, as you say, "the bomb".'" or something like that.
Not to mention this book is soooo straight. I mean, sure, there's a one-line mention of one character being gay. It's never mentioned again and is never relevant to anything. And no, this isn't equal to great representation (look, there's a gay character whose sexuality isn't the main plot! yay me! no.). Yet the main character talks about her good friend as her "girlfriend", and any kind of attempt at inclusion of a gay character is just null and void. Attention straight women (and especially straight women who call themselves allies): don't do this.
Anyway, the plot was messy, the characterization was messy, and the attempt to tackle very important issues (i.e. racism, domestic abuse) was even messier. I wish I could've liked this better, but I didn't.