Emotional read

I cried through a good portion of this book! She wrote from the mothers perspective so well! It's so timely and relevant. ( )

Janice. The mother of Marquis, a teenaged boy who's been shot.

Meredith. The wife of the man who shot Marquis.

Wyatt. The white man accused of shooting and killing Marquis--who was black. Was Wyatt only standing his ground, as the law permits?

Stand Your Ground by author Victoria Christopher Murray is one of those novels that's hard for me to rate. Even though ratings generally reflect how readers feel about a book, folks still judge a book's merit by its ratings. The measure of a reader's feelings and the measure of a book's merit aren't necessarily the same.

This novel made me feel a number of emotions, including anger and sadness, as it's indeed a tragic story, in more ways than one. I was intrigued during a few moments, but on the whole, the story didn't surprise me. I do like how not all the characters of either race think exactly alike, none of them are perfect people, and there's some nuance in the black community's response to the killing.

Now, while the novel doesn't have any words that network television would bleep out nowadays, there's some language I don't appreciate seeing in ChristFic. Other times the writing seems repetitive, clichéd, or keyword conscious, as if to fit in or repeat certain common phrases.

More importantly, I would've liked to see more purpose and dimension for some of the characters. Although I liked seeing Meredith's perspective, she ultimately doesn't seem pivotal to the plot. The story's "bad guys" are like caricatures, and in the end, Wyatt's character just didn't make sense to me.

In all, my biggest takeaways from this read are reminders not to take prejudgments as facts and to beware of accepting "loud" perceptions without thinking critically, without searching and listening carefully, listening closely, for truth. ( )

While the book Stand Your Ground is a novel it clearly based on the horrific events that have been playing out in our communities and on our screens over the past year. It was a fast read, an emotional read and I finished it in less than a day. It was easy to relate to Janice and to every character in this book including her husband and others who were distrustful of the courts and wanted to seek their own type of justice. I probably would too, in my grief, despair and knowing that justice might not be served. Yet, Janice stood her own ground as she sought justice without violence. The tensions between Janice and Tyrone were beautifully detailed as they grieved differently and separately which is so often the case.

While this book is compulsively readable I did, at times, feel that it veered into the romance novel genre and the writing lost some of its depth. Yet, overall an eye-opening, truth-telling book about one of the most important issues of our time. ( )