Junauda PetrusRezensionen

From Kirkus: "Readers seeking a deep, uplifting love story will not be disappointed as the novel covers both flourishing feelings and bigger questions around belief and what happens when we face our own mortality. Main characters are black."

Nothing really pulled me in or captivated me about the book or story.
#ownvoices

This book has stayed with me. I read it standing in a bookstore and on first take it didn't stick. However, I came home and kept thinking about it. I looked it up online and found a video of the author reading it as a poem. The delivery of it was magnificent. The book makes the message more accessible to new audiences.

The message is important. It forces us to reimagine a world and community where we are accountable to each other, not police, not heavy-handed laws, but where we can have compassion and accountability to our community. Our elders can help to guide and shape it. An artist friend said good art should make you feel something and force you to think, even if it is uncomfortable.

I used this to open up a conversation in a college class about language and reimagining what racial justice could look like. I also read it to my pre-teen and enjoyed it. I want both to see a different view of what community could look like, that is what art can do.½

Hear me out as to why I do not like this book. Like at all.

It was originally a poem. By putting it into picture book form, it no longer readers like a poem. Rather it reads, and I try to comprehend it, like a picture book. It would have been a more effective medium in a style similar to "Ain't Burned All The Bright" (if you want pictures) or "The Hill We Climb". It needs to feel like a poem.

But it doesn't and with it, I feel the message it lost.

Additionally, due to how it is presented, I feel as if myself, admittedly a white woman, is slighted and ignored. That I am part of the problem. Which is neither here or there (because yes, white cops have been brutal and wrong in their treatment of others.) But what about my white grandmothers? Who would give me a look and get me on the straight and narrow? What about my white grandmothers with whom I would cook gnocchi and cannoli and be reminded that I could do anything I set my mind to? What about those with abuelitas? Those who taught them to make tamales? Should we the police department to those grandmothers too? Or just those in urban populations?

I don't mean to sound harsh. I love the essence of what is there. But additionally, when a poem originally uses words like "badass" and "sensual", I think of adults reading it. Not children. Not only now do caregivers need to tackle topics like brutality and incarceration they now need to tackle words too.

I feel bad giving it such a low rating but also like, the plot and the characters were so underdeveloped and the magical realism just felt awkward and it was really unrealistic (like, the last 40-ish pages especially) and it had the potential to be so much better than it was. It's hard to fall in love with a love story when the romance is between two vessels of history and backstory instead of two actual human beings. None of the characters had any depth at all-- there was the piece of shit mother and then literally zero other villains or people with ANY character flaws throughout the rest of the book. Also, the pacing was HORRIBLE. Like, literally so bad. Everything that I actually wanted to witness (like the diagnostic process or her finding out she was sick or any signs that she was sick, for example) was literally just... skipped. Like, imagine writing a story about someone who meets their true love, and then instead of telling the story of how they meet, skipping a few months ahead and being like "so these people met and now they are lovers." And then it spent like 80 years telling me about things I could not care less about that were totally irrelevant to the story. Oof. Bad.

Recommended in a blog post at https://booksbeyondbinaries.blog/2021/03/29/new-books-by-genderqueer-breakouts/

fiction, young adult, LGBTQ+, 2SLGBTQ+, LGBT, romance, QTBIPOC, immigration, coming of age

I'm in complete awe of this book. It's one of the best things I've read in recent memory.

"The Blackness between the stars is the melanin in your skin. I read it in a book. I take it to mean that as Black folks we are limitless. That, maybe, our blackness holds our dreams, not just churches and Bibles?"

I finished this one earlier in the week and I am still basking in the glow of the magic in its pages. Junauda Petrus' writing skills are gold. I especially love the structure of the book because it wove in astrology, feminism, ancestral powers, magical realism, spirituality and healing, queer love and astronomy. She showed out with this treasure and reminds the world that Black people are magic PERIOD!

I loved the dual point of views of Audre and Mabel. Their characters had depth and I enjoyed their transformations and adjustments to their new situations. My heart broke for the abuse and eventual uprooting that Audrey faced for being a queer Trinidadian. Mabel's storyline was a gut punch very early on. I loved the exploration of their identities through books, horoscope and ancestral gifts of healing. Petrus made every scene on the page come alive. I know the ancestors approve because this book was an ode to the beauty and magic of Blackness and an offering to thank them for all their knowledge and talents.

Not only did this book have great quotes but it also expanded on interesting themes:

🌠 Family is sometimes made and not just blood ties.
🌌 Freedom starts in the mind and heart.
🌠 Black identity and feminism is magic and transcends what is seen.
🌌 Knowing yourself fully requires knowledge of all that ancestors have to teach.
🌠 To see the future, you may have to visit the past.
🌌 Trusting yourself and your inherent gifts is crucial to your identity.
🌠 Love is meant to be free, not boxed into categories.
🌌 Understanding multiple forms of spirituality help you experience humanity fully.
🌠 Blackness is limitless.
🌌 There is no place in the world for hate of any kind.
🌠 You have to be uprooted in order to bloom where you're supposed to.
🌌 Identity is a lifelong journey and not a linear pathway with only one option.
🌠 Books open minds, save lives & provide healing.
🌌 True healing is holistic.

This book will live in my heart forever.

This is, hands down, one of the most interesting, original YA books I’ve ever read. I’m incredibly glad I got the chance to read it, and I’m a bit at a loss as to how to describe it. There are a lot of different threads here, all of them working together to illustrate interconnectedness, the link between people, between the past and the present, between the body and the spirit. It’s a spiritual book, rooted in both New Age and historical Black sensibilities. This spirituality is so deeply felt that you don’t have to believe in things like astrology (which features heavily) in order to be moved.

The story is mainly character- and theme-focused, and it moves with the zodiac seasons, jumping from Aries to Taurus to Gemini and so forth. Occasionally, these gaps in time feel a bit like a stutter; sometimes characters will forge relationships “off-screen,” so to speak, and I found myself wishing that I could’ve seen more of their interactions, especially when it came to Audre and her father. But Mabel and Audre’s voices and inner lives develop so steadily and realistically that it’s easy to forgive the book’s minor flaws. The larger time jumps - or time mergings, perhaps, the weaving together of the protagonists’, Queenie’s, and Aufa’s youths - are handled deftly and were perhaps my favorite part of the book. So many threads, all of them coming together in a way that reinforces a theme of solidarity and transcendence.

One thing that I really appreciate about a lot of children’s/YA books I’ve read this year is the kindness that permeates them. This is a book about love, and it’s a book that loves. It loves its characters and treats them with the respect they deserve. The narrative never punishes them for forging strong bonds with one another or for standing up for what they believe - their love, hope, and spirituality are portrayed as powerful rather than naive. They struggle, but they ultimately maintain their dignity. Please, please read this book.

I loved it! ❤