Since the book takes place over one weekend, the romantic relationship comes off feeling insta-lovey. Which is not my favorite trope to read, but the relationship was very sweet and I’m always in favor of more books depicting Black Love & Black Joy. ( )

Not as strong as Leah Johnson's debut young adult novel, but a nice follow up. Olivia and her best friend Imani go to a three day music festival and are determined to have a great best friend weekend. Olivia needs to escape a situation in Indianapolis with a boy and this is the perfect getaway. Imani makes her promise that this weekend is just for the two of them and not for falling in love (something Olivia likes to do on a frequent basis), but those plans quickly get de-railed. Toni and her best friend, Peter, have attended this festival yearly and are excited to hang out and enjoy the sunshine and music. For Toni, it's a last hurrah before she starts college at IU. When she rescues Olivia from a camping mishap and subsequent asthma attack, the two find themselves linked for the whole weekend. Together they are going to enter the talent show, find all the golden apples, and maybe fall in love. I loved the setting, and I loved their backstories - I just didn't appreciate how quickly they both threw off their best friends. Not cool. Other than that - good story! ( )

Rise to the Sun is Leah Johnson’s sophomore novel. There’s a lot of good to it! For example, there’s a wide variety or representation in parental backgrounds and friendship dynamics. All the characters are interesting enough, and I really enjoyed the musical festival setting – why aren’t there more music festival settings in books? Lets make it a thing. Still, Rise to the Sun is not as strong of a book as You Should See Me in a Crown and I’d like to dig into “why”.

At its base, Rise to the Sun is still an entertaining book and 100% worth reading – please don’t let anything in this review throw you off. I never considered DNF’ing this book, not once. It’s more that, while reading, I found myself disappointed that the protagonists and dynamics did not live up to the high bar set in You Should See Me in a Crown. Johnson wrote Rise to the Sun amidst the pandemic, and as such, it’s fair to expect a different experience – I think all of us were high affected by the last couple years, and we should be kind to others.

The fundamentals are this: it feels like a lot of the plot and characters are still trapped in Johnson’s head. There’s a lot of movement and a lot less subtlety in this novel than her previous one, and as a result, I found myself having to pause and figure out who was speaking and where they were and what was going out. I think one of the challenges here was that this book is a dual POV – something new for the author. As a single POV, I believe we would have been able to get to adequately know Toni or Olivia, get on board with their motives and learn their histories. Otherwise, the book could have been longer to give each of the protagonists room to breathe.

I mentioned earlier that I loved the setting – I did! There’s so much going on at festivals like that and they are so much fun. It’s the type of setting that can really come to life. In some places, it did! I really would have liked to see more integration into the festival, the adrenaline and the music. With the exception of one set, we only heard about the concerts and silent discos and so forth. I want to say that we spent too much time inside the characters’ heads instead of enjoying the setting, but that’s not true, either. It comes back to the fact that the book should have been longer to meet its full potential. Too much going on to give any one thing justice.

Speaking of “too much going on”, lets talk about the plot. A lot of things going on here on a few different levels – the growing romantic relationship, the thing Olivia is running from, getting all the apples, Toni’s quest to find her path, winning the Golden Apple, Olivia and Imani’s friendship. There are also another couple events that occurred in the course of the story that could have been a spinoff subplot. Again, we find ourselves backed in a corner with a lot of problems to solve and very little time to solve them. The romantic relationship takes the most space, but even then, it’s clunky. Another example of wishing it was a longer book. In particular, I’m frustrated that Imani never got to go on the Ferris Wheel.

There are a lot of little things to nitpick about Rise to the Sun, but at the end of the day, it all comes down to the same cause – this book either needed one POV, or it needed to be a little longer to allow things to develop a bit more. It’s entertaining and it’s nice to see all the rep and I love the setting. It’s a very readable book, and not unenjoyable, but it wasn’t all it could have been. ( )

**Received as an ARC from the publisher

I haven’t read Johnson’s debut novel, You Should See Me in a Crown, but when I was sent this ARC from Scholastic I was super excited to finally try out her writing. From page one I was hooked into the story, which sets Olivia and Toni (two girls from very different backgrounds) against the backdrop of a music festival. Both girls are dealing with trauma in different ways and using the festival as an escape mechanism, but their accidental meeting over an uncooperative tent at the festival’s campground sets in motion events which makes them both face their fears, start making different choices about their lives, and grow up just a little. Wrapping everything together is a healthy dose of teenage romance (yesssss, just what I need to feel those #summervibes), which Johnson artfully blends with careful character development to keep from getting too cheesy. If Johnson’s other books are this good, I’m definitely going to be keeping my eye out for more of her writing! ( )