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steggellettea94 's review for:
The Whispers
by Greg Howard
So, this was not what I expected. No spoilers, but it wasn’t as magical as I thought. It is also not a light-hearted read. I will say there is homophobia and the main character, Riley, does struggle with some internalized homophobia. What really kept this from a 5 star, was the random mentions of Black people - more accurately how they were portrayed. Gary felt almost...like a caricature. He liked one particular slang term - “dawg” - and when he was first introduced, it felt odd and thrown in. He punctuated many of his sentences with “dawg,” and it felt like it was there to remind us that he was Black. The bus driver, Miss Betty, started to creep into the sassy black woman stereotype in just the couple scenes she was in. There is another very brief mention of a young Black boy who has red lips. It was a throw-away line, a descriptor, but it was uncomfortable and didn’t sit right with me. Maybe I’m too sensitive, but these little touches and the fact that this was written by a white author made me uneasy and I had to mark this book down. While I’m happy this is an #ownvoices, and that the main story is loosely based on Howard’s own, the descriptions of three of the four black characters really unsettled me. I can only hope Greg Howard’s other book is better.