I received an advance copy of this book for an honest review.

This was probably the most anti-black book I have ever read but the fact that it was written by a Black woman made it heartbreakingly painful. Within the book, Blackness is defined and shaped around tragedies - as if Black people experience no joy or have lives beyond the nation’s racism, biases and social injustices. Every conversation centers around the pain and fears of being Black and raising Black children in a world that doesn’t love them. While yes Black people as a community experience unspeakable hardships against us, it is not our entire personality. The Black boys mentioned in the story are all troubled and in the constant loop of the criminal justice system. The Black women are either a step from hotep with conversations only about protests, police brutality and their natural hair or they are doing all they can to assimilate into the European standard of beauty. The Black men are either unsupportive or a step away from being a podcast bro wanting Black women to lean more into whiteness. Sending the message to readers that life is better being white disgusted me more than I could ever imagine. When the Black characters in this book are faced with how to live a world where they don’t face racism, the writer doesn’t hold racists accountable. She instead says the answer is to stop being Black. This author literally wrote a story that sends the message that Black people simply being Black is the problem NOT the racism of some white people and the systems they uphold.

WHAT. THE. ACTUAL. F*CK?

In the last eight years of giving ratings, this is only the third time I have given a one star review to a Black author. I now realize that comparatively, the other two books need another star added to them because this was not only the worst thing I have ever read, this is by far the most insulting to Black people.

To the readers that hate reading about Black people experiencing or discussing racism:

I initially thought you would hate the acknowledgement of Black pain in this book. I thought fans of this author, who has consistently shown in her writings that Black girls cannot experience or find happiness without the erasure of Blackness, would question and frown at her sudden desire to write about the atrocities that Black people face consistently at the hands of white America. I thought you would be the ones giving this book a one star review. However, stick to the end, this book takes her erasure of Blackness to another level. It’s clear the author believes the world is better without Black people in it. It is the textbook definition of anti-blackness.73 s12 comments BriAuthor 1 book212

I’m sorry, but this book was extremely unserious. I say this not to be mean, but because I feel it's accurate: this story seemed an author processing a lot of grief around police brutality post-2020 in the form of Get Out fanfiction (respectfully), and think it really could've stayed between Yoon and...not a mainstream audience.
I found the discourse sometimes painfully heavy-handed ( directly pulled from Twitter), being in the main character's POV the entire time was tiresome, and the plot, which was initially SO intriguing to me, felt rushed and half-baked.
I thought I understood what Yoon was trying to do at the beginning, making Jasmyn's character so self-righteous yet anxious about her racial identity, but...the book outright defined Blackness by how much suffering we've endured, or how upset we get about police brutality, which...we all have different ways of relating to and coping with being so constantly exposed to our people getting killed by the police, and fearing for our own lives on a daily basis. The main character seemed more critical of Blackness than whiteness, which is very weird when the central events in the book revolve around state-sponsored violence.
I'm disappointed this didn't go a little deeper, because the premise of a gated Black "utopia" and the cult of wellness are so interesting to me! And the relationship between the Black elite and poor Black people, who ARE more heavily policed...this book had a lot of potential.

I do Yoon’s writing because it flows easily--perks of being a YA author too--but this was just not it for me.38 s2 comments Jessica Woodbury1,745 2,538

This may be the best example of all the ways social horror learned the wrong lessons from the success of GET OUT. The takeaway to so many seems to be "horror + racism" is a winning combination but despite the over-the-top third act of GET OUT, that full tilt absurdity is earned from two slow, subtle acts before it. Its strengths are in the subtleties. It holds you in a mild discomfort, makes you unsure whether there is a threat and what that threat is, escalating little by little, and then when it finally really goes for it it takes it to an almost nonsensical, even hilarious place to help cut the tension. On the other hand, what most of the works following it have done is just say here are the horrors of structural racism, now with monsters. They present racism without subtlety, it is an anvil, a piano falling from the sky and smashing on a sidewalk, it is just "what if racism but worse?"

That, sadly, is what is happening in this novel. Which is really just a Stepford Wives remake switching to a lens of race rather than gender. Our protagonist, Jasmyn, is a good person, a good member of her community, a public defender devoted to helping those who need her, who are often young Black men. Jasmyn is overwhelmed by racism, she watches every video, she bears witness to every act of cruelty, and while it makes her sad and scared, it also gives her a sense of duty. Jasmyn, somehow, is able to do all of this, to confront racism and to never let go of it, without burnout or fatigue. But when the opportunity comes to move to an all Black luxury neighborhood, she takes it almost without question.

This is where things start to get confusing. A lot of what happens here makes no sense, and I mean that in both the character way and the facts of the story. sure you could definitely just build a whole new luxury community in the greater Los Angeles area where all the homes are huge and the neighborhood is big enough for a whole school and services. (This is so hilariously impossible you just have to let it go.) Oh and did I mention that you can get a house here with 6 bedrooms and an olympic sized pool for low 7 figures? Jasmyn doesn't seem the kind of person who would want this, she cares about her community. But she weirdly doesn't care about her husband's new wealth since he left teaching and went into finance, she isn't enthusiastic about the neighborhood but she worries about her son and the baby on the way so she agrees.

Jasmyn doesn't really exist as a person in this book. Her work, her community, all these things we are told she cares so much about are barely mentioned. Her child, who is supposed to be the focus of all this anxiety she has, also disappears for several chapters at a time. All that Jasmyn does is follow stories about racial violence on the news, talk to her husband, and hang out with her new friends in Liberty, the other outcasts who don't actually it all that much. This is all she does. She worries about racism in the world and she worries about what is weird in her neighborhood. She does not seem to have hobbies just the book is completely uninterested in a B plot of any kind. Jasmyn is a cardboard cutout, but at least she is described. Whereas her husband King and the other basically brainwashed residents of Liberty are never more than ciphers.

If you know the story of Stepford Wives (and everyone does) this is all quite dull. We know where the story is going, we know what's going to happen, there are no surprises here. It can be fine to have a story where it's not really about the destination but the journey, but there is not any fun on the journey either. There is no satire, no plot, just a series of regular escalating events to grow us closer to the inevitable ending. Well, we do get plenty of Jasmyn judging everyone else for not watching enough videos of police shootings and not attending enough vigils and not experiencing racial trauma in the way she has decided is correct.

When it's fully revealed it's quite boring, which is expected at this point but also disappointing. This is the one place where Yoon doesn't totally spoon feed us her themes. All these weirdly calm people at Liberty who no longer care about structural racism are also people who have suffered traumas well beyond anything Jasmyn ever has. There is something to this idea, that there is some kind of breaking point where your trauma can be so overwhelming that you no longer want to find any kind of progress, that you want only safety at any cost. But this idea is almost entirely unexamined, which is a shame because it's basically the only interesting thing in the book.

The novel is clunky. It reads more YA than adult, the kind of book where the writing is secondary and just a vehicle of plot delivery. It is bad enough that it makes me wonder if my rave review of her previous novel The Sun Is Also a Star was wrong. arc-provided-by-publisher authors-of-color speculative21 s1 comment Richelle Robinson1,235 35


I was so excited to read this book because I love Yoon’s young adult novels, but this story was a mess. The anti blackness was running wild and rampant in the story. The main character Jasmyn was so judgmental over the other Black women who wore their hair a certain way. Then she got upset when one of the characters didn’t want to watch a video of a Black man getting killed by a police officer. As a Black woman I can no longer watch those videos either. After watching Eric Garner being killed here on Staten Island where I live that was final straw for me. Surprise, surprise the cop was found not guilty.
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