Reviews

Seventeen-year-old Avery and her family were only leaving Washington DC for Bardell, Georgia to tend to Avery’s terminally ill grandma, Mama Letty. What unfolds is an exploration of trauma, fear, and secrets — whether personal for some situations and intergenerational for others — that are interconnected through history.

suffering_succotash's review against another edition

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Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

tone warning: negative, critical

Disappointing. I think this book thinks it's doing something that it actually is not doing, which is rather unfortunate for its purported ethos. What is clearly meant to be a book centered around anti-racism and social justice suffers from an (unacknowledged-ly) privileged main character, who continuously gets away with avoiding all but the most shallow bouts of introspection. Additionally, while acknowledging Black beauty is absolutely important, Simone's character feels less appreciated and more objectified in the main character's eyes, to the point of fetishization.

I will say that the prose was quite lovely in some places--one of my favorite sequences simply involved a description of a river, along with some much needed philosophizing. This felt detached from the main character however, with whom I believe this book wanted us to sympathize (I am in no way unfamiliar with gray characters--I love them. The framing, however, suggested that this main character was meant to be read less as gray, and more as "right").

Avery wants to insert herself into a world and a culture that is far removed from her own. As she does this, she wants to be able to speak--quite rudely most times--for, at, and over the voices of those she meets who call that location home.

The narrative wants her to get away with this. Not only that, but it wants for her to be right to do so in the first place. It is a position of unjustified entitlement, and the only way to make it "work" is by cleverly contorting the surrounding world, flattening everyone and everything around her.

Every character from Bardell county suffers because of this, seemingly relative to who Avery's narrative needs them to be. The story is in first person, so it is of course natural that our picture of other characters be filtered through the main character's lens. There is a great difference, however, between a character being filtered through an MC's perspective and a character *being* an MC's perspective on them. Ironically, what results is a situation where one of the most complex characters seems to be Simone's mother, Carole, while one of the flattest characters is Avery's love interest, Simone. Beyond physical traits, Simone winds up being no different from your average shallow, white, cis, hetero romance fantasy's manic pixie dream girl.

If the narrative weren't so hell-bent on shielding Avery from having to learn anything, from having to confront the complexities of her own privilege and spend some time on uncomfortable, but important, introspection, then maybe everyone around her would not have had to feel like convenient platforms and props for her taking. As it stands, however, the story feels like an exercise in appropriation of Drake-ian proportions: co-opting victim narratives that don't belong to you, so you can see yourself as always overcoming the impossible.

In short, an evidently underdeveloped, unnuanced understanding of privilege leaves what ought to be an examination of the nature of justice ringing more like a narcissistic fantasy: a story strung from the perspective of a privileged person who wants to always be "in the right", without question, and especially without the hard work of self-reflection.

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