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A review by indiekay
Whiteout by Angie Thomas, Dhonielle Clayton, Ashley Woodfolk, Nic Stone, Nicola Yoon, Tiffany D. Jackson
4.0
Holiday Romance Readathon 2023: 18
This is a great YA anthology! It's not SUPER Christmassy - the second story is probably the most holiday-centric of all of them. The story is quite diverse, too - I think all the characters are Black, but they're from different cultures. There's one character that is Muslim, 2 fat girls, 2 sapphic romances, and I THINK Stevie was autistic and nonbinary? Not super sure on that one.
The audiobook is absolutely fantastic, I love how they used a different narrator for every story, and when there's a text conversation the messages from each character is read out by their narrator.
What I didn't love about this was Stevie, and the reason for that was that she was SUCH an asshole to the Uber driver. Like he's decorated his car with holiday lights and is playing Christmas music, and she snarkily says it's not very inclusive to people of different faith - to which he then shows he can change the lights and music to all the holidays you can think of. And what does she do? She rudely yells at him to just switch it all off because she can't think with all the noise. Which, okay, cool - but what I hate most about that scene is that she's one of those people that use inclusivity as a weapon against people instead of actually caring about being inclusive, and I fucking HATE those kinds of people. And the Uber driver drove her to the stadium during a freaking snowstorm and she barely thanked him.
So that's where the plot fell flat for me - Stevie never actually learnt anything during this book, and her big grand gesture to her girlfriend was cute, sure - but she never actually apologises to Sola's family for how big of a dick she was to them (I mean, she was telling native speakers that they were pronouncing words in their own language wrong - like, fuck off?). What's more, that poor Uber driver deserved an apology from her too.
Most of the story is told from Stevie's POV, which is a pity because I really liked all the side stories. I'd been hoping that since we jumped back to Stevie between each story, we'd jump back to the other couples too. I wanted to see how the other couples got out of the mall and the traffic jam and stuff.
Those complaints aside, though, this is a really nice anthology and I do recommend it - especially in audio. I also haven't read Blackout so this one can definitely work as a stand-alone, but I'm adding Blackout to my TBR for next month.
This is a great YA anthology! It's not SUPER Christmassy - the second story is probably the most holiday-centric of all of them. The story is quite diverse, too - I think all the characters are Black, but they're from different cultures. There's one character that is Muslim, 2 fat girls, 2 sapphic romances, and I THINK Stevie was autistic and nonbinary? Not super sure on that one.
The audiobook is absolutely fantastic, I love how they used a different narrator for every story, and when there's a text conversation the messages from each character is read out by their narrator.
What I didn't love about this was Stevie, and the reason for that was that she was SUCH an asshole to the Uber driver. Like he's decorated his car with holiday lights and is playing Christmas music, and she snarkily says it's not very inclusive to people of different faith - to which he then shows he can change the lights and music to all the holidays you can think of. And what does she do? She rudely yells at him to just switch it all off because she can't think with all the noise. Which, okay, cool - but what I hate most about that scene is that she's one of those people that use inclusivity as a weapon against people instead of actually caring about being inclusive, and I fucking HATE those kinds of people. And the Uber driver drove her to the stadium during a freaking snowstorm and she barely thanked him.
So that's where the plot fell flat for me - Stevie never actually learnt anything during this book, and her big grand gesture to her girlfriend was cute, sure - but she never actually apologises to Sola's family for how big of a dick she was to them (I mean, she was telling native speakers that they were pronouncing words in their own language wrong - like, fuck off?). What's more, that poor Uber driver deserved an apology from her too.
Most of the story is told from Stevie's POV, which is a pity because I really liked all the side stories. I'd been hoping that since we jumped back to Stevie between each story, we'd jump back to the other couples too. I wanted to see how the other couples got out of the mall and the traffic jam and stuff.
Those complaints aside, though, this is a really nice anthology and I do recommend it - especially in audio. I also haven't read Blackout so this one can definitely work as a stand-alone, but I'm adding Blackout to my TBR for next month.