#BlackLoveBooks Challenge Day 1: YA Love: a young adult book on love
I keep saying that I’m going to expand my reading horizons and incorporate more YA novels into the mix. Back in my bookstore working days, I didn’t understand grown adults purchasing young adult novels, which to me were barely different from kids’ books. After all, they were shelved in the same section. Even after leaving the bookstore, I continued to be baffled by my grown office co-workers reading the genre. I realize now that my giving the side-eye to adults who read and loved the Twilight and Harry Potter series was just me being a snob. A good book is a good book. Those books were such bestsellers that they along with Hunger Games, Divergent and scores of other series or novels were adapted into blockbuster movies viewed by all ages.
The Poet X by renowned slam poet Elizabeth Acevedo has popped into my radar several times. Once was in a Buzzfeed article Don’t Miss These Fantastic YA Books By Black Authors That Release This Year and another time was a PEN America Instagram post about the author’s appearance during a Facebook livestream discussion as part of their Read the Resistance series. The novel follows fifteen-year-old Xiomara Batista, who is being raised in Harlem under religious tutelage of her mother. Knowing she can’t tell her mother about her feelings for a boy at school, Xiomara writes her feelings in her poetry notebook. Adding to her angst is her longing to join a slam poetry club that her strict mother would never let her join, but she’s determined to find a way “because in the face of a world that may not want to hear her, Xiomara refuses to be silent.”
I’m intrigued and that’s why this book has been added to my TBR list and was chosen as today’s book challenge pick. It’s long overdue considering the last YA novel I read was The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (also on the Buzzfeed list) last year. Like other good novels, The Hate U has been adapted into a movie and slated for release this year.
Just Sherring 