Gr 9 Up—Los Angeles, 1992: While the city is consumed with protests after the beating of Rodney King, wealthy
Black high school senior Ashley contemplates her own perceptions of her race and those of her classmates as she
attends a predominantly white school—a realistic journey to action filled with detours and new discoveries. This is a
nuanced and authentic coming-of-age story with pitch-perfect historical details and timeless themes.

This book is so good and engaging, I was completely hooked from the first page. The narrator’s voice is so realistic, and her story feels both very relatable but also uniquely her own. The story is set in California in the 1990s. I guess some people are calling that historical fiction now, which blows my mind, but whether you want to call it historical fiction or not, this story will feel very familiar to people living in the United States in 2020 as protests against racism and police brutality are happening around the country. I highly recommend this book to teenage readers. ( )

Definitely relevant for today’s readers. Made me think back to that horrible time and realize nothing has truly changed. Read this in one sitting. This would be a great book for teaching in history and ELA classes…a strong #ownvoices story. ( )

Relevant Then.
Relevant Now.
Relevant Forever. ( )

It is my own fault that I wildly misunderstood the intended emotional aspect of this book. After reading the blurb, I was under the impression that this would be a coming-of-age tragedy full of action and strong family and friend ties. By chapter eight, I realized I was wrong. This is in fact an incredibly slow-moving character study stuffed full of purple prose, told convincingly through a teen narrator. She is a self-centered, wealthy teen who thinks her views on the world are profound when they're actually quite shallow considering her lack of life experience, and she thinks she's better than everyone. I -was- that teenager. I recognized her for who she was right away, and was relatively non-judgmental. The previous sentences are much harsher than my actual thoughts were, while reading this. "Oh, it's me. I grew up. Good for me." This book had FAR too many chapters, and they got increasingly shorter as the book continued. The author had no idea how to conclude the book and it drove me insane. THE MAIN CHARACTER COULDN'T STOP NARRATING, -far- from when the book needed to end. She was so detached, from page one! Convince me! But you can't! Because you just do not care. Since she did not care, I did not care about a single character in this book. She kept pointing out what everyone looked like, and I felt like I was missing something very important. That irked me. I kept flipping through the e-book, trying to piece together what I was clearly missing. I never found it.

She cheats with one of her friend's boyfriends and waah wahh WAAAHs about it CONSTANTLY. OMIGOD, JUST SHUT UP. I hate cheating in books and other media. Allow me to pause and conveniently ignore that one of my favorite songs is "Lips of An Angel" by Hinder, which is about cheating, and a movie genre I like a lot has cheating as a plot point (fatal attraction movies). Uh, I forgot where I was going with that. She's not close to her friends, doesn't seem to like her family all that much, and her supposed coming-of-age is crammed into a few paragraphs near the end of the book. Also, this book takes place during the Rodney King riots of 1992. Since the main character is so detached from everything, I felt like this could have taken place during any time between 1992 and now. There's no emotional weight to this book at all or what the MC experiences. At no point did I feel like I was in 1992. I didn't feel any more knowledgeable about the Rodney King riots, either. I had been looking forward to both of those as a reader. I was disappointed.

Mental health as a topic is jammed into the final quarter of the book, in an almost "blink and you miss it" way. Non-heterosexuality is mentioned as "oh look, I must also mention this because this takes place in the 90s, and rely on parodic gay stereotypes, especially of men of color." Sloppy! Not -every- 90s period piece needs to mention non-heterosexuality. But a lot of them mention the AIDS crisis. My favorite book mentions it in a "blink and you miss it" moment in regards to a cancer patient worrying about a blood transfusion. FWIW, -that- book is -much- better about being set in the 90s, although it's 1998, not 1992. "The Black Kids" mentions it for like, two seconds in connection with non-heterosexuality, and...I don't know where the author got her information, but the only nurses who cared about AIDS patients were ones at San Francisco General, and they risked their jobs. Okay, I double-checked. She probably was referring to the AIDS Project, which helped dispatch home nurses. Instead, she blathered on about the AIDS quilt and angry parents for a paragraph and I was confused. This story is set in LA, but does not feel like LA. Palm trees are mentioned--why?

An author who's quite talented about writing novels about LA in the 90s is Francesca Lia Block. I highly recommend starting with the short story anthology "Girl Goddess #9" and going onto the novel "I Was A Teenage Fairy". Those are all about non-heterosexual white kids, though, and don't rely on stereotypes. I wanted to like "The Black Kids." It would have been a far more interesting book had it been from Morgan's or Jo's perspective. I understand this was a debut of the author, but I hesitate to consider checking out further works of hers when the time comes. ( )