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A review by marireadstoomuch
Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes by Phoebe Robinson
3.0
I had been looking forward to this book for a few weeks (three separate bookstores I tried had been sold out of it!) and thus was really excited to finally get my hands on a copy. Almost immediately, though, I found myself a bit disappointed — though largely due to style/personal preference rather than content — and a few of the essays I really enjoyed!
I’ll start with the positives: a lot of specific moments and experiences stood out and were funny (the writing of weights on forearms in sharpie before bungee jumping, for example, was very funny), and I agreed with her on pretty much every sentiment she shared. The essay i mention above, “Black Girl, Will Travel,” was my favorite. It had a perfect mix of serious and funny, and felt balanced and engaging. It also had fewer (in a relative sense) of the stylistic things that kept me from really enjoying the collection.
I didn’t know this beforehand, but truncating words is apparently a really big pet hate of mine: “quar quar” for “quarantine” is one that sticks out, but the truncation is constant (often more than once per page) and distracting/jarring for me. There were also a number of moments of truncation followed by spelling out the full word — “cultch aka culture” — which felt like a waste of time, and some truncations that made it literally hard to understand the phrase at first glance (e.g. “In seas three,” which made no sense until the rest of the sentence added context to give me the meaning: “in *season* three;” “sosh meeds” for “social media” took me a moment to work out). This viscerally impacted how I experienced the book, which was often insightful, even if the jokes at times didn’t land (or the good jokes got lost a bit amidst the mediocre/trying a bit too hard ones).
I wish I would’ve liked this book more, though the three-essay run of “Black Girl, Will Travel,” the titular essay, and “We Don’t Need Another White Savior” was truly excellent, and the final essay “4C Girl Living in Anything but a 4C World: The Disrespect” was brilliant as well. Worth a read despite the stylistic issues, though I think some essays could have been cut to give more space to the real gems. (Those essays are 4.5 stars, the others fell flat to me; if we could do half stars I’d give the full collection 3.5.)
I’ll start with the positives: a lot of specific moments and experiences stood out and were funny (the writing of weights on forearms in sharpie before bungee jumping, for example, was very funny), and I agreed with her on pretty much every sentiment she shared. The essay i mention above, “Black Girl, Will Travel,” was my favorite. It had a perfect mix of serious and funny, and felt balanced and engaging. It also had fewer (in a relative sense) of the stylistic things that kept me from really enjoying the collection.
I didn’t know this beforehand, but truncating words is apparently a really big pet hate of mine: “quar quar” for “quarantine” is one that sticks out, but the truncation is constant (often more than once per page) and distracting/jarring for me. There were also a number of moments of truncation followed by spelling out the full word — “cultch aka culture” — which felt like a waste of time, and some truncations that made it literally hard to understand the phrase at first glance (e.g. “In seas three,” which made no sense until the rest of the sentence added context to give me the meaning: “in *season* three;” “sosh meeds” for “social media” took me a moment to work out). This viscerally impacted how I experienced the book, which was often insightful, even if the jokes at times didn’t land (or the good jokes got lost a bit amidst the mediocre/trying a bit too hard ones).
I wish I would’ve liked this book more, though the three-essay run of “Black Girl, Will Travel,” the titular essay, and “We Don’t Need Another White Savior” was truly excellent, and the final essay “4C Girl Living in Anything but a 4C World: The Disrespect” was brilliant as well. Worth a read despite the stylistic issues, though I think some essays could have been cut to give more space to the real gems. (Those essays are 4.5 stars, the others fell flat to me; if we could do half stars I’d give the full collection 3.5.)