Tag: contemporary novels

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Book Review: ‘Boom Town’ by Nic Stone

Summary: Boom Town by Nic Stone centers on a strip club employee who searches for her former work bestie after the replacement hiree also goes missing. Now that two women have disappeared without a trace, she finds all trails lead to one mysterious man. 

Synopsis: Micah, who goes by Lyriq, works at Boom Town, an established strip club in Atlanta. She gained notoriety performing with Felice, known as Lucky. Lyriq distances herself after a devastating breast cancer diagnosis. She has undergone surgeries to remove her breasts and is deciding on reconstruction surgery. The burden is too heavy to share with Lucky. 

But Lucky takes the distance as abandonment. She finds solace with a customer named Thomas McIntyre. Thomas is not the average patron; he is a White man and a secretive music executive. He tells Lucky he wants a baby while his wife does not. Lucky gravitates toward Thomas’ promise of helping her find meaningful work outside Boom Town. 

Lyriq is usually resting whenever she gets a chance at the club. She can no longer dance, but she helps keep the club running smoothly. One night, she finds Lucky after an assault. She knows Lucky needs her, but when she tries to understand the turn of events, Lucky is gone. 

When Lucky stops showing up to work, Lyriq assigns Lucky’s locker to Damaris, who becomes Charm. She vouches for Charm as a favor, but the teen is having trouble applying her dance skills to Boom Town’s expectations. Then, Charm disappears. But so do thousands of dollars from the club. Lyriq is now forced to find Charm (and the money) and start the search for Lucky. 

Theme: Power, privilege, and control

Like in most (if not all) stories surrounding a strip club, the power dynamics are clear-cut. The dancers are at the bottom of the hierarchy. The clients who are enjoying their bodies hold the power. In this story, the women are navigating their lives around the obstacles to hold onto their power.

Lucky and Charm don’t matter to Bones, the club’s manager. He is furious about Charm stealing money from the club. But he sees their disappearances as annoyances; he has to hire more dancers. And on top of that, he is losing money over Lucky and Lyriq’s act coming to an abrupt halt. It is due to Lyriq’s health condition, which triggers a domino effect as Lucky becomes dangerously close to Thomas and subsequently disappears. 

The club holds some power over them. Lyriq stays at the job to pay for her health care. Lucky has a master’s degree in education, yet makes more money as a dancer than on a teacher’s salary. Then, she gets trapped in Thomas’s web of deceit to the point Lyriq belatedly questions the bond. 

The surroundings these women had lived in before the strip club felt overpowering as well. Before she became Lucky, Felice separated herself from her family. Before she became Charm, Damaris was involved with a youth pastor at her church. She was underage while believing she was in a mature relationship. To find their power, they found themselves at Boom Town, where their power was under threat again. Micah, Felice, and Damaris are fighting to gain control over their situations. 

Theme: Missing Black women and chosen family

A body is found in the first chapter of the novel. Lady Josephine, an unhoused woman, discovers the body in the woods, where she has created a home. She represents a segment of the population of missing Black women. 

The main theme of the novel is the plight of missing Black women and how they can quietly disappear from a community. Boom Town is a place of business, but when two employees stop coming to work without an explanation, nothing happens. Nobody reports them missing. People who are looking for them feel like they could get more done than the police. And some people do not connect their absence to a disappearance. 

It’s a strip club, while most corporate workplaces will at least contact authorities if an employee fails to show up. Boom Town is a place where many workers have severed ties with friends and families outside of it. This is why Lyriq knows she must look for Lucky and Charm. 

As for Charm, she has Dejuan, a friend she was living with, who comes to the club looking for her and raises the alarm on her disappearance. This heightens Lyriq’s concern and forces her to activate the hunt for Lucky, too. 

Theme: Motherhood

Being a mother takes on many definitions in this story. Lyriq serves as a motherly figure to Lucky and Charm. She knows she is the one looking out for these girls in a dangerous environment, inside and outside Boom Town. 

According to Thomas, his wife, LaBrettney aka Brett, does not want a baby. He is obsessed with having a child. Lucky finds herself becoming empathetic. But her empathy leads to danger. More threads tied to motherhood and reproductive choices affect Felice, Damaris, and Brett.  

Conclusion: The author’s adult debut novel has heart and grit, but it is a rocky read with multiple first-person points of view shifting back and forth from the present and the past. The writing is stream-of-consciousness, so the characters’ voices lift off the page. For some readers, this may distract them from engaging with the story. There is a lot of exposition, where the author explains backstory upon backstory and bookends chapters with the present. The story is unique and thrilling for a commercial fiction novel, but the changes in voice and writing style weigh it down, potentially heightening or diminishing engagement. 

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘Red Clocks’ by Leni Zumas

Red Clocks by Leni Zumas is a layered, multi-perspective story following the lives of four women in the Pacific Northwest who find themselves questioning the feelings they have about motherhood as the U.S. starts implementing restrictive reproductive laws. 

The characters are labeled as their occupations. First, we have Ro, known as the biographer. She is in the process of writing a biography of a lesser-known 19th century female polar explorer named Eivør Mínervudottír. Still in mourning over her brother’s death, Ro gets up every day and teaches history at the local high school. Sometimes, she starts her mornings off at a fertility specialist’s office since she is trying to get pregnant in her late thirties with the assistance of a sperm donor. 

“When Congress proposed the Twenty-Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and it was sent to the states for a vote, the biographer wrote emails to her representatives. Marched in protests in Salem and Portland. Donated to Planned Parenthood. But she wasn’t all that worried. It had to be political theater, she thought, a flexing of muscle by the conservative-controlled House and Senate in league with a fetus-loving new president. Thirty-nine states voted to ratify. A three-quarters majority… She couldn’t believe the Personhood Amendment had become real with all these citizens against it.” 

The Personhood Amendment was just ratified by Congress giving every fertilized egg the constitutional right to life, liberty, and property. This federal law also bans abortion in all 50 states with providers at risk of being charged with second-degree murder and abortion seekers at risk of being charged with conspiracy to commit murder. In vitro fertilization is also banned as the transfer of an embryo from laboratory to uterus is considered illegal. 

Another law, Every Child Needs Two, is taking effect soon where two parents with a valid marriage license are the only eligible people to adopt children. Single, unmarried people like Ro will soon be prohibited from adopting children. Her plan for motherhood has always been delayed as she was searching for her soulmate, but these laws have quickened her actions. She’s getting tests frequently to see if her body can carry a baby to term with a sperm donor. But her chances of getting pregnant are low. And now she wonders how much time she has to rush her adoption application to get a child before she’s not allowed to. 

“You can’t say it was rape or incest—nobody cares how it got into you.”

Mattie, known as the daughter, is a student in Ro’s class. A stellar student, she finds out she’s pregnant. Her best friend, Yasmine, had been in the same situation right when the Personhood Amendment went into effect. The situation Yasmine was in destroys their friendship, so Mattie feels lonely as she looks for ways to get an abortion secretly, whether that means crossing the border into Canada or getting help from the mender. 

“American intelligence agencies must have some nice dirt on the Canadian prime minister. Otherwise, why agree to the Pink Wall? The border control can detain any woman or girl they “reasonably” suspect of crossing into Canada for the purpose of ending a pregnancy. Seekers are returned (by police escort) to their state of residence, where the district attorney can prosecute them for attempting a termination. Healthcare providers in Canada are also barred from offering in vitro fertilization to U.S. citizens.” 

The mender, or Gin, is a traditional herbalist who lives away from society in the forest where her family has been known to make concoctions that treat ailments for centuries. When the Personhood Amendment goes into effect, Gin is still helping women with their abortions like she had always done, like her family generations before her had always done as reproductive care. When Mattie walks through her door, she feels a tinge for the sense of motherhood she gave up. Soon after, she is in a courtroom on trial for administering an abortion to another woman who ends up in the hospital with serious injuries. 

Then there’s Susan, the wife. She is the wife to Didier, another high school teacher who happens to be work friends with Ro. Battling the fatigue of raising two younger children, Susan is tired and feels unappreciated by Didier, who likes to come home after dinner with his work buddies without giving her a heads up. Their marriage is fraught with friction that only Susan senses as she goes through her daily housewife chores. She wonders what it would be like to abandon her marriage and her children for another man, even with the Every Child Needs Two law looming. 

In the background of all these contemporary perspectives is the long-gone explorer Eivør Mínervudottír, who according to biographer Ro, goes on all-male expeditions after rejecting marriage at age 19. Male domination follows Eivør as she constantly educates the men she’s venturing into the Arctic with. Though we don’t sense any longing for children or becoming a mother from her, Eivør’s femaleness still leads to her demise in a world where her rights were always restricted. 

“The girl is a mirror, repeating, folding time in half. When the mender had the same problem, she didn’t solve it how Temple told her to. Terminations were lawful then, but the mender wanted to know how it felt to grow a human, with her own blood and minerals, in her own red clock.” 

From the quote above, we learn “red clocks” is a term for the uterus, the organ that carries babies up to nine months in pregnancy and sheds its lining every month for a period. The organ is the biological clock for women, always running on a schedule for the purpose of reproduction. 

Mattie wants to stop the clock in order to continue her studies and to go off to college. Even though she was careful, even though her friend Yasmine was careful, pregnancy still occurred, and pregnancy in their teenage minds is shameful and destructive. On the other hand, Ro wants to get the clock fixed. She desperately wants a child, and when she learns that her star student Mattie is pregnant and needs assistance in getting an abortion, she can’t help but feel the complicated feelings. She can’t get pregnant while the teenagers who are in her face every day can easily get pregnant and not want to be pregnant, not want to have a child.

Complicated feelings come up for Gin when Mattie approaches her makeshift clinic for assistance. When abortion was legal, Gin used her red clock to give birth, but she didn’t keep the baby. Though she helps other females with their abortions, something about Mattie’s case strikes a chord with Gin. On another end of the spectrum, Susan gave birth to her first child when she was finishing up law school. The regret of not fulfilling her career goals because she had to start a family knots up inside her. Her red clock worked when she wasn’t ready, but now she’s wondering what life would’ve been like if it had not worked efficiently and she wasn’t tethered down to a husband and children. 

How the characters’ lives intersect is awe-inspiring because their stories reflect the complexity of reproductive decisions. It’s not easy to have a baby, and sometimes the woman with the red clock is the only one factored into the equation. Feelings change about motherhood where we see Ro putting the pedal to the metal to beat laws that would restrict her decision on motherhood to Susan who already has kids but now feels anchored to a marriage she no longer wants.

One underlying factor throughout the narratives is the characters are all dealing with the loss of a person or the sense of family that is surfacing more as they make their decisions on bringing a baby into the mix. The mourning seems to be louder at this stage in their lives and shows how even when family is perceived as important, depending on where you stand with your family, there is still insurmountable stress as the person wanting to expand the family.

Overall, this novel is very timely as the U.S. deals with anti-abortion laws and the overturning of the history-making Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that almost hit its 50-year milestone. Regardless of the pro-choice, anti-abortion, or in-between supporters, the story parallels real life well with the attention on reproductive laws and how those changes can affect all women, like the characters in this small fishing town in Oregon where its proximity to Canada means nothing. The rhythmic flow of the story helps open up the characters’ narratives, though minor characters’ narratives sometimes get lost in the interweaving. At the center, still, is how political and personal decisions on reproduction can wreak havoc in changing times. 

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Book Review: ‘Detransition, Baby’ by Torrey Peters

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters explores the complexities of parenthood between two women and a man who unite in an effort to take care of a baby, but the closer they get, the more they convince themselves they’re making a mistake. 

Reese always wanted to be a mother. In fact, she acts as a mother figure in the New York City transgender community, taking in young trans women who remind her of herself when she first came to the city from the Midwest. Upon her arrival, she quickly became a go-to caretaker for children on the Upper East Side. She has the natural gift of taking care of others. One of the trans women she had taken under her wing was Amy, who returns in her life in a form she’s unfamiliar with. 

Ames is a marketing executive having a sultry fling with his recently divorced boss, Katrina. They soon realize they are expecting a baby. Katrina had a miscarriage during her marriage, so she’s nervous about the pregnancy. She’s also at the top of her game at work, and she’s unsure how a baby she’s having with a subordinate fits into her career plan post-divorce. Ames can’t believe he even impregnated a woman, but now that he has, he suggests bringing in an old friend to help parent the baby. 

When Reese sees Amy again, Amy is now known as Ames. Amy detransitioned from a trans woman back to a biological man. Ames explains how he thought years of taking hormones to live as a female would decrease his fertility. But now that a baby is coming, Ames wants to tap Reese to be a secondary mother and assist Katrina to raise the child. Reese always wanted to be a mother, and she feels her chances were dashed when she and Amy broke up. Now, who Reese still can’t believe is the Amy she used to love is offering the opportunity of motherhood.

Skeptical of the idea of becoming a mother by playing a third parent in raising another woman’s baby, Reese starts hanging out with Ames and Katrina to see if she can get onboard with the proposal. Katrina has questions and misconceptions of how Reese lives as a trans woman and how Ames lived as a trans woman. The clashes melt away once Reese and Katrina realize they are simply women who want to be mothers. It takes a village to raise a child. But when Katrina realizes why Reese and Amy broke up, she starts to rethink the concept of letting Reese play a mother and herself become a mother.

This is an eye-opening novel exploring a part of the New York City trans community rarely seen in mainstream media. Reports say that this book is one of the firsts written by a trans author to be distributed by a “big five” publisher. It’s refreshing to learn about how these fictional trans women feel they are competing with biological women to demonstrate their femaleness, including their capability and desire to become mothers. The author, who is a trans woman, spent time in the community to nail down the intricacies of the characters, their backgrounds, and their desires. 

The spectrum of characters represent different people who interact in the community. There is the trans person, the former trans person, and the cisgender, heterosexual person fighting their biases to accept someone they actually meet in real life who is trans. For Reese, her sex life is complicated with having committed lovers and secret lovers. The emotional struggle of identifying as female in a world that deidentifies her as not female makes her feel like she could never commit to a monogamous relationship long enough to raise a child with someone. For Ames, he detransitions soon after ending his relationship with Reese but still struggles on pinpointing what made him want to live as male again, especially when Reese pushes for answers. For Katrina, she is wrapping her brain around the fact she is having a baby with someone she didn’t know had lived as a woman for years, but her open-mindedness forces her to shake the anger and accept the perceived affection she’s receiving from Ames and now Reese. 

Overall, this novel again shows a community rarely magnified in the literary world. Pushing the boundaries that women who have penises also have desires to be mothers, and though it could be difficult to produce that child biologically depending on the partner, they will make a way to be mothers. Humankind, regardless of identities and circumstances, wants love, and this story shows the road for these characters finding that love unexpectedly with each other, though their inner demons try to destroy what they have. By the way, a TV series adaptation is in the works.

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘Passing’ by Nella Larsen

Passing by Nella Larsen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


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Passing by Nella Larsen follows two fair-skinned Black women who reconnect as friends but sense danger every moment they spend together because one decides to pass as White and the other fears the consequences of her friend’s secret life.

White people were so stupid about such things for all that they usually asserted that they were able to tell; and by the most ridiculous means, fingernails, palms of hands, shapes of ears, teeth, and other equally silly rot. They always took her for an Italian, a Spaniard, a Mexican, or a Gypsy. Never, when she was alone, had they even remotely seemed to suspect that she was a Negro. No, the woman sitting there staring at her couldn’t possibly know.

Irene Redfield goes into the Drayton in Chicago to escape the heat. She gets into the fancy hotel due to her complexion. She’s assumed White, so she keeps her head down and sips her tea. Until an unfamiliar woman comes up to her calling her by her childhood nickname ’Rene. It takes more conversation for Irene to realize she’s talking to Clare Kendry. They grew up together until Clare’s drunken father died and Clare was sent away to live with relatives. There, she began to pass as White leading her to have a White family who doesn’t know she’s Black. When Irene learns Clare is living her life as a White woman, she’s taken aback by the revelation. Irene lives in Harlem with her Black family, and walking into the Drayton is the only time she passed for White.

Catlike. Certainly that was the word which best described Clare Kendry, if any single word could describe her. Sometimes she was hard and apparently without feeling at all; sometimes she was affectionate and rashly impulsive. And there was about her an amazing soft malice, hidden well away until provoked.

As they try to rebuild their bond, they have trouble figuring out how each other fits into their lives. Irene can’t risk Clare being around her, her Black friends, and even her White friends in case someone realizes she’s passing. And Clare can’t risk anyone finding out she’s Black. The will-they, won’t-they friendship notches up when Clare shows up at Irene’s home in Black Harlem wondering why her friend hadn’t answered a letter she sent. That’s when Clare admits she misses the Black community and asks Irene to introduce her to the Redfields’ social circle. Irene obliges but knows Clare’s true racial identity could be exposed. She feels an inkling of guilt as opportunities open up for her to reveal Clare, whose charisma has sucked the air out of every room Irene is in. One major opportunity does open up, but as Irene wrestles with the idea to take it, she realizes Clare is already in grave danger.

The danger and fear rises in the portrayal of Clare’s marriage and Irene’s marriage. Clare’s racist husband John Bellew calls his wife Nig, a shortened version of the n-word he gave her in response to her tan. This repulses Irene and forces her to understand the danger not only outside in the world Clare has to deal with but the danger sleeping beside her at home. With Bellew’s temperament, the reader gets the assumed vision of Clare’s marriage that she purports as a perfect union.

On the other hand, Irene’s doctor husband, Brian, tells her to not get involved with Clare’s dangerous antics. We also see Irene’s desperation to read Brian’s distant emotions. He seems unhappy with their home life and the racist world they live in. When Clare enters the Redfields’ lives, Irene is hesitant to invite Clare to social functions whereas Brian, originally repelled by Clare, now is too eager to accompany Clare. This makes Irene even more fearful for her marriage and fearful for what she is capable of in imploding Clare’s life.

Sitting alone in the quiet living room in the pleasant fire-light, Irene Redfield wished, for the first time in her life, that she had not been born a Negro. For the first time she suffered and rebelled because she was unable to disregard the burden of race. It was, she cried silently, enough to suffer as a woman, an individual, on one’s own account, without having to suffer for the race as well. It was a brutality, and undeserved.

Overall, the novel’s two main characters warring internally with themselves and each other over their racial identity brings other issues into the light. The story examines a friendship that isn’t meant to be reestablished as Irene, whose voice resonates more, and Clare, whose voice remains buried, question their race and the circumstances it has put them in. The novel, written in 1929, is in the same vein of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby yet doesn’t have the same stature in American literature. It shows two Black women instead striving for riches with Clare presenting herself as a White woman married to her White international banker husband as they prepare to send their daughter to boarding school in Switzerland; and Irene deciding to identify as Black in Black Harlem with her Black doctor husband and two sons and still having the means to afford a maid. Clare senses that Irene may not have as much money as her, but at least she has the freedom to be herself. It’s the themes of what is considered a luxurious life and what sacrifices have to be made in order to live that life that resonates a century later.

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film reviews

Why ‘Waiting to Exhale’ Has Staying Power Onscreen

From left, Loretta Devine, Whitney Houston, Angela Bassett, and Lela Rochon in "Waiting to Exhale."IMDb

Today is the 25th anniversary of Waiting to Exhale‘s cinematic debut, a film that brought a never-before-seen look into the ’90s grown Black female experience. The timing coincides with author sisters Attica and Tembi Locke embarking on a project to bring Terry McMillan’s best-selling novel to TV. Currently in pre-production, the series is following in the footsteps of the 1995 film and adding the TV binge element to screen.

Mystery novelist and Empire screenwriter Attica Locke and her sister, memoirist and actress Tembi Locke, are under a script commitment with ABC and Empire creator Lee Daniels to bring the story to TV, according to Deadline. The entertainment website also noted in November that Terry McMillan will serve as a consulting producer. It’s been 25 years since Waiting to Exhale sparked a cultural phenomenon among Black female viewers who wanted to see their stories onscreen.

The film Waiting to Exhale starred the late singer Whitney Houston as Savannah, a TV producer who longs for a married man; Angela Bassett as Bernadine, a mother of two whose husband is leaving her for a White woman; Loretta Devine as Gloria, an overweight single mother who owns a hair salon; and Lela Rochon as Robin, an executive trying to elevate from mistress to wife. The story and film is set in Phoenix, Arizona, a city known for a low Black population but symbolically represents a phoenix rising from the ashes and starting over.

In Dorothy Butler Gilliam’s 2019 memoir Trailblazer: A Pioneering Journalist’s Fight to Make the Media Look More Like America about being the first Black female reporter at The Washington Post, she discusses the cultural impact of the film that opened in theaters on Dec. 22, 1995. She recounts the moment with her friend and Post executive, Joyce Richardson, and quotes her saying:

“‘Just like the friendship of the characters Gloria, Robin, Savannah, and Bernadine, our get-togethers lifted us up when we were down, helped us network, gave us shoulders to lean on, advice when we needed it, and a safe place to share the good and bad times,” she said. “Each of us could connect with the issues that these women had in one way or another.'”

The novel became a No. 1 best-seller and the film hit No. 1 on Christmas weekend 1995, dominating over Disney and Pixar’s first computer-animated venture Toy Story, Jumanji, and Grumpier Old Men.

The book’s characters are trying to figure out their relationships with men, which impact family, faith, and career, but it brings them closer as a way to de-stress. Friendship between women over men troubles is a common theme in works, but Waiting to Exhale incorporates the Black female perspective, which in 1992 was rare in contemporary literature.

With the 2000s HBO series Sex and the City still in reruns based on a novel by Candace Bushnell, the stories don’t age with time. But with Black women as the stars during a time when 47% of Black adults are single in a dating-app world, according to recent data from the Pew Research Center, the new show could resonate on a higher level than it did 25 years ago.

How the new version of Waiting to Exhale will be perceived in the #MeToo era, where women are looking for female friendships but may not be bonding over men trouble, has yet to be seen.

Amid the #BlackStoriesMatter movement sparked by the George Floyd protests, Terry McMillan tweeted earlier this year that she wasn’t getting the same amount of interest for her 2020 novel, It’s Not All Downhill From Here.

Attica Locke released her latest book, Heaven, My Home, last year. She’s also worked on the Netflix miniseries When They See Us about the Black men formerly known as the Central Park Five. Her sister, Tembi Locke, is an actress and wrote a grief memoir, From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home, about moving forward without her late husband. The memoir, a former Reese’s Book Club pick, is on track to become a film on Netflix with the aid of Hollywood bookwoman Reese Witherspoon.

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘The Idea of You’ by Robinne Lee

The Idea of You

The Idea of You by Robinne Lee

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


“The Idea of You” by Robinne Lee is an unexpected well-conceived story about an older woman falling for a boy band member. It sounds like a fantasy ripped out of the tabloids, but it captures the complexities of such a relationship and how the world reacts to it.

Solene Marchand is dealing with the emotions before a 40th birthday when she gets stuck with taking her daughter, Isabelle, and friends to an August Moon concert with backstage access in Las Vegas. As the teen girls stay enamored on the British boy band, Solene finds herself flirting with the bandleader himself, Hayes Campbell. While living her life as an LA art dealer, Solene meets up with Hayes when he’s in town as he flies her out to where he is until they have a full-blown love affair that surprisingly develops into an authentic relationship. Except Solene feels the relationship threatening her art gallery business with her partner Lulit, her relationship with Isabelle, her relationship with her ex-husband Daniel who’s of course having a baby with a 30-year-old model, and her reputation in general with fans sending threatening messages via social media and postal mail. But Solene and Hayes try to beat the odds amid the craziness.I’ve been disappointed with some of the recent women’s fiction/romance books because in many cases the issues and characters become stereotypical and the storyline is forced into a happily ever after. This book actually shows the progression of a modern-day fairy tale relationship and the rockiness that comes with it. The ending is refreshingly unexpected yet emotional. The writing is fantastic, which again in other recent works seemed to be either missing or the only upside to the book.

What’s great about this book is the reader travels with August Moon, a fictional mashup of One Direction/The Wanted/and all those other recent boy bands out of the U.K., since Solene gets a first class ticket and hotel suite with Hayes everywhere. It covers Aspen, Miami, Malibu, Paris, Tokyo, the Hamptons and so many other destination cities, so it feels like you’re there admiring the scene though Solene and Hayes spend a lot of time in their suites. Also, the stakes of the romance are high. Not only are Solene’s relationships feeling the heat, but so are Hayes’ with one of his bandmates vengeful of destroying the romance and past hookups continually making appearances around the world.

Overall, there are great elements throughout the story, and the book is a great piece of women’s fiction with serving up the steamy sex scenes and drama on every corner. And Lulit is the best because she’s Ethiopian, and we’re rarely in books, especially books like these, so the whole time I envisioned her as me, and that was fun.

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