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motherofbooks93 's review for:
Chlorine Sky
by Mahogany L. Browne
“SKY SAYS It’s like all my life I’ve let how others feel about me Tell me how I feel about myself.”
This is the story of this girl named Sky and her friendship with her best friend Lay Li coming to an end and her trying to cope with that while also dealing with the everyday struggles of being a teenager.
I saw this being compared to Elizabeth Acevedo and I can see why that comparison exists. This is written in verse like two of Acevedo’s novels and it deals with some similar topics.
The main thing the story focuses on is this friendship between the two girls ending and the reasoning and fallout of that happening. I really enjoyed that being the main focus of the story because so often we get YA books that focus on relationships instead of friendships despite them being such a huge part of our lives at that age.
This book also talks about other important issues such as colorism, featurism and sexism. I thought it handled all of those topics really well. I do think you have to have some working knowledge of colorism and featurism in the Black community to get the full picture in the story since they’re not heavily explained in the text, but I feel that this was written for Black teens, which I loved, so I’m good with that. Browne also briefly touches on drug use, but it’s not a huge part of the story.
Unfortunately, there were some things that didn’t work for me. One was that this was too short. Because this is written in verse, it doesn’t give you a lot of time to get to know the protagonist. I don’t even think we learned her name until the end of the book and while we learned a few things about her, none of it was in depth, so it made it hard to connect to her and her story. I wish this was about 100 pages longer, so the story and characters could get more time to get fleshed out because the ideas presented were great, they just needed more pages and time.
I also don’t understand why this was called Chlorine Sky and the cover features water because I feel like it was more focused on Sky playing basketball versus her swimming. If you don’t like sports in your books, this is one you may want to skip because it’s a pretty significant part of the story.
Like I mentioned earlier, I see the Acevedo vibes, but this wasn’t as in depth as her books tend to be, which is why it fell a little bit flat for me. I would definitely read more from this author though and I still would recommend this to a teen audience, especially Black teens.
CW for sexual assault (small scene & not many details)
This is the story of this girl named Sky and her friendship with her best friend Lay Li coming to an end and her trying to cope with that while also dealing with the everyday struggles of being a teenager.
I saw this being compared to Elizabeth Acevedo and I can see why that comparison exists. This is written in verse like two of Acevedo’s novels and it deals with some similar topics.
The main thing the story focuses on is this friendship between the two girls ending and the reasoning and fallout of that happening. I really enjoyed that being the main focus of the story because so often we get YA books that focus on relationships instead of friendships despite them being such a huge part of our lives at that age.
This book also talks about other important issues such as colorism, featurism and sexism. I thought it handled all of those topics really well. I do think you have to have some working knowledge of colorism and featurism in the Black community to get the full picture in the story since they’re not heavily explained in the text, but I feel that this was written for Black teens, which I loved, so I’m good with that. Browne also briefly touches on drug use, but it’s not a huge part of the story.
Unfortunately, there were some things that didn’t work for me. One was that this was too short. Because this is written in verse, it doesn’t give you a lot of time to get to know the protagonist. I don’t even think we learned her name until the end of the book and while we learned a few things about her, none of it was in depth, so it made it hard to connect to her and her story. I wish this was about 100 pages longer, so the story and characters could get more time to get fleshed out because the ideas presented were great, they just needed more pages and time.
I also don’t understand why this was called Chlorine Sky and the cover features water because I feel like it was more focused on Sky playing basketball versus her swimming. If you don’t like sports in your books, this is one you may want to skip because it’s a pretty significant part of the story.
Like I mentioned earlier, I see the Acevedo vibes, but this wasn’t as in depth as her books tend to be, which is why it fell a little bit flat for me. I would definitely read more from this author though and I still would recommend this to a teen audience, especially Black teens.
CW for sexual assault (small scene & not many details)