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A review by bookph1le
American Street by Ibi Zoboi
2.0
What ruined this book for me was how it dealt with violence against women. Some spoilers ahead.
I could not get behind Kasim as a love interest, and I want to say up front that one of the things that annoys me about YA novels, to the extent that I have mostly stopped reading them, is that there always has to be a romance shoehorned into them. The romance with Kasim raises the stakes for the main character, but I found it totally unnecessary because the stakes are already high for her. She's already caught between her desire to help her mother and her desire not to betray her aunts and cousins. Why does a boy need to be added to that mix?
I also just plain did not like Kasim as a character because he had one giant flaw: he was complicit in his friend Dray's abuse of his girlfriend, Donna--and Donna happens to be Fabiola's, the main character, cousin. Whenever Fabiola brings up how Dray treats Donna, Kasim takes the line of "that's just how they do things", and though Fabiola doesn't much like it, she just goes with it. No. Plus, Kasim not only looks the other way, he actually enables and abets Dray by doing things like telling Donna that Dray just wants to talk to her when Donna has every right in the universe to not want Dray anywhere near her. He shows up at a basketball game with Dray on purpose, because they know Fabiola and Donna will be there. This was just not okay with me. Were it not for this huge, glaring, deal-breaking flaw, I would have liked Kasim as a character. He's interesting and his story is complicated, and he seems like a good guy at heart, but I just could not handle someone who's essentially a domestic abuse apologist being portrayed as an appealing love interest.
Honestly, I think I was also just not into the direction the book took. It felt like two separate stories to me, one about Fabiola's fight to get her mother back and one about her cousins' and aunt's struggles. Fabiola's mother being taken from her is set up as the central conflict of the book, but it takes a back seat to things like establishing Fabiola's romance with Kasim. There is nothing wrong with this as a plot choice, it's just not a plot choice I personally care for. I would have preferred to see more about Fabiola's adjustment, and definitely more about her mother and what her mother was going through.
In the end, this book just didn't speak to me, but I get how it speaks to a lot of other readers, and I'm one hundred percent behind expanding the field of publishing so that everyone can find themselves in a story and its characters.
I could not get behind Kasim as a love interest, and I want to say up front that one of the things that annoys me about YA novels, to the extent that I have mostly stopped reading them, is that there always has to be a romance shoehorned into them. The romance with Kasim raises the stakes for the main character, but I found it totally unnecessary because the stakes are already high for her. She's already caught between her desire to help her mother and her desire not to betray her aunts and cousins. Why does a boy need to be added to that mix?
I also just plain did not like Kasim as a character because he had one giant flaw: he was complicit in his friend Dray's abuse of his girlfriend, Donna--and Donna happens to be Fabiola's, the main character, cousin. Whenever Fabiola brings up how Dray treats Donna, Kasim takes the line of "that's just how they do things", and though Fabiola doesn't much like it, she just goes with it. No. Plus, Kasim not only looks the other way, he actually enables and abets Dray by doing things like telling Donna that Dray just wants to talk to her when Donna has every right in the universe to not want Dray anywhere near her. He shows up at a basketball game with Dray on purpose, because they know Fabiola and Donna will be there. This was just not okay with me. Were it not for this huge, glaring, deal-breaking flaw, I would have liked Kasim as a character. He's interesting and his story is complicated, and he seems like a good guy at heart, but I just could not handle someone who's essentially a domestic abuse apologist being portrayed as an appealing love interest.
Honestly, I think I was also just not into the direction the book took. It felt like two separate stories to me, one about Fabiola's fight to get her mother back and one about her cousins' and aunt's struggles. Fabiola's mother being taken from her is set up as the central conflict of the book, but it takes a back seat to things like establishing Fabiola's romance with Kasim. There is nothing wrong with this as a plot choice, it's just not a plot choice I personally care for. I would have preferred to see more about Fabiola's adjustment, and definitely more about her mother and what her mother was going through.
In the end, this book just didn't speak to me, but I get how it speaks to a lot of other readers, and I'm one hundred percent behind expanding the field of publishing so that everyone can find themselves in a story and its characters.