Reviews tagging 'Slavery'

Different Kinds of Fruit by Kyle Lukoff

1 review

emily_mh's review against another edition

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challenging emotional hopeful informative slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.25

Before starting in with my review, I wanted to share my two cents regarding two common criticisms that I’ve been seeing of this book. The first is that the book is confused as to which age demographic it is targeting, as it purportedly has a juvenile MC but also deals with complex topics. However, I personally don’t think Annabelle is juvenile, she’s just acting her age which is literally 12 years old. I’m pretty sure I acted the exact same way at that time of my life. Regarding it being “too complex” for middle-graders, I’m not sure that we, as adults who were middle-graders in a very different time (e.g. for me around 2009-2011) are the best judge of what middle-graders in 2022 find complex to understand. Furthermore, the reason that queer discourse seems complex is because it isn’t educated about in schools when it really should be. It should be normal to be thinking about these topics in depth from an early age. Why are we criticising this book for a fault of society? Regardless, I thought it made queer discourse very accessible to a young audience anyway. 

The second common criticism is that this book lacks direction. I wholeheartedly disagree. This is a character-driven story clearly demarcated by Annabelle coming to terms with herself, her family, and her peers, and learning about queer identity and social issues along the way. 

Now onto what I want to say. This book just exudes joy and hope. It was incredible seeing such detailed queer rep in a MG book and I can see how life-changing it could be for queer kids! I LOVED reading it. I learnt so much about queer discourse that I have never been exposed to. I appreciated that the book showed in lots of cases that there’s no obvious right answers to questions of identity, that so much is still unknown or is incredibly dependent on individual circumstance, that answers can change over time. I also liked how it illustrated how what we might find acceptable now could change in the future, as has already been the case in the queer community. 

Admittedly, a couple of things were a LITTLE convenient, for example
Annabelle’s relationship with Julian, Mike’s rapid character development, etc.
, but none of those things could significantly overshadow how much I loved this read. 

As a side note, the audiobook was phenomenal! Cassandra Morris is definitely a favourite narrator of mine. She really brought the story to life; it was like I was reading a movie, if that makes sense. 
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