A review by lezreadalot
Ain't Gonna Be the Same Fool Twice by April Sinclair

3.0

“Child, maybe your nature is a journey, and not a destination.”

A good read, if not quite as enjoyable as the first in the series. It's not that it doesn't live up to it or anything, but I think the charm and the whimsy of the 60s slang has done all it could for me. While I still enjoyed this narrative and following Stevie as she grows up and learns some more life lessons, has a few big upheavals in her life, and navigates her new surroundings as a black woman just beginning to own her bisexuality, it just wasn't as potent for me. There are a lot of bullet-proof themes here for me, like the way it addresses racism, and especially the way it calls out the rampant biphobia that has always existed in so many subgroups. But I had a bunch of little nitpicks.

And see, here's the problem that arises when I don't take notes and I wait a day or so to write my review: I don't actually remember what a lot of those issues were. LOL. So maybe they weren't that notable, but I just remember there being many times when the book showed its age, and actually kind of disappointed me in the way it chose to address certain things. Again, I don't really remember the sources of my annoyance, but I just know that this didn't land as well as the first one. It's not really the fact that it was so plainspoken. Unlike the first book, I would categorise this as adult, and sometimes I did wish that the writing were a little bit more subtle to reflect that. But I mostly enjoyed the simple writing. Just not really the way the author chose to handle some stuff. Like, I really wished we'd discussed internalised racism a little more, for example.

Listened to the audiobook as read by Amber Patrick, which did wonders to improve my impression of the book, as it always is with any writing that I don't absolutely love. The narrator hammed it up a lot, but it was apt and warranted imo. I'm not sure if I'll continue the series, but this ended in a good enough place that I feel okay about leaving Stevie here.