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All This Want
Win a free print copy of this book!
15 days and 16:55:43
15 copies available
U.S. only
A piercing short story collection that explores the feverish hunger and dizzying pleasure of girlhood and queer coming-of-age in a small town, from an acclaimed emerging writer
Set mostly in and around a small working class neighborhood, Clark explores the lives of young Black girls, women, and nonbinary characters, slicing through the filmy veil between adolescence and adulthood; between who they’ve been, and who they might become.
D’asia’s friendship with a school security guard is teetering close to inappropriate. Jonessa and Linda have stumbled into a conversation with a man at a gas station who agrees to buy them a bottle of alcohol for a party. Chrissy is looking to play roulette on a trip with her boyfriend but ends up in a hotel room with two strangers. Juju’s mother dresses her up for a meeting with a local music producer. A little sister cringes as a friend tries to hook up with her older brother. A fight breaks out at a party and the video goes viral. A woman can’t stop walking by her ex’s window, hoping to catch a glimpse of all she lost.
In story, Clark excavates the push and pull of desire and power running beneath tender and bare moments. With sharp sentences and great affection, All This Want (and I Can't Get None) centers characters whose points of view are too often sidelined.
Set mostly in and around a small working class neighborhood, Clark explores the lives of young Black girls, women, and nonbinary characters, slicing through the filmy veil between adolescence and adulthood; between who they’ve been, and who they might become.
D’asia’s friendship with a school security guard is teetering close to inappropriate. Jonessa and Linda have stumbled into a conversation with a man at a gas station who agrees to buy them a bottle of alcohol for a party. Chrissy is looking to play roulette on a trip with her boyfriend but ends up in a hotel room with two strangers. Juju’s mother dresses her up for a meeting with a local music producer. A little sister cringes as a friend tries to hook up with her older brother. A fight breaks out at a party and the video goes viral. A woman can’t stop walking by her ex’s window, hoping to catch a glimpse of all she lost.
In story, Clark excavates the push and pull of desire and power running beneath tender and bare moments. With sharp sentences and great affection, All This Want (and I Can't Get None) centers characters whose points of view are too often sidelined.
208 pages, Hardcover
Published June 23, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
June 24, 2026
it's giving song title.
(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)
(review to come)
(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)
(review to come)
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Usually short story collections aren't my thing but the blurb stood out to me on Netgalley so I requested it and I was not disappointed.This reminded me a bit of 'The Secret Lives of Church Ladies' in the sense that it explores want and desire among black people and in the community,even if this one was focused on teens and young adults mostly.
thank you to the publisher for the arc:)
thank you to the publisher for the arc:)
June 24, 2026
Short story collections can be tricky sometimes, with some being home runs and others falling flat— but this collection was a steady and engaging ride from start to finish!
I really enjoyed how similar the settings of the stories were, even when they were completely different themes, scenarios, and characters. But having them set in the same general area really tied them together and made it feel like I was peering into a window directly into a town/suburb.
My personal top 3 stories were Justin, A Great Dad, and Candy Girl. T. Clark’s voice is clear and compelling in this book, and I’d read more by them!
Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for sending an ARC for review in exchange for my honest thoughts.
I really enjoyed how similar the settings of the stories were, even when they were completely different themes, scenarios, and characters. But having them set in the same general area really tied them together and made it feel like I was peering into a window directly into a town/suburb.
My personal top 3 stories were Justin, A Great Dad, and Candy Girl. T. Clark’s voice is clear and compelling in this book, and I’d read more by them!
Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for sending an ARC for review in exchange for my honest thoughts.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
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T Clark’s “All This Want (and I Can’t Get None)” turns hunger, class aspiration, queer becoming, and sexual attention into a deadpan, devastating study of how recognition so often comes pre-contaminated.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 16th, 2026
A girl alone in the room where hunger, self-invention, and the dangerous terms of being seen begin to take on their shape.
Want, in T Clark’s “All This Want (and I Can’t Get None),” rarely arrives naked. It comes dressed for the occasion, hair fixed, smile rehearsed, line ready, posture adjusted, edges smoothed just enough for the room to clock it. These stories are full of appetite: for food, money, sex, glamour, safety, relief, a better room, a softer life. Clark is after the shabby work want has to do just to get answered at all. The book’s real subject is the labor of making desire legible: to a man, a room, a label, a family, a stranger behind a podium. More than a collection about girlhood, queer coming-of-age, or class aspiration, this is a book about performance as survival technology.
That is where the book stops asking permission. A lazier collection would let want explain itself. Clark has colder ideas. Here, wanting is stitched together under pressure. Her characters style, smooth, harden, rename. They flirt, joke, audition, posture, and lie their way toward whatever the world might briefly toss them. The trouble, comic and not, is that recognition so often arrives already tilted toward somebody else’s appetite: as a ride home, a hundred-dollar bill, a room upgrade, a proposition, a nickname that sounds like a promise until it starts to sound like a price.
The title story tightens before you quite notice the room has gone quiet. D’asia, thirteen, wakes up to expired milk, no eggs, no Bisquick, no breakfast, no time. Hunger here is not atmosphere. It is a growling-stomach problem, a kitchen problem, a daughter problem. Into that lack steps Tevin, the school security guard who talks to her “like I was a regular person,” gives her groceries, lets her crash on his couch, slips her lunch money, and eventually hands her a vibrator in a little pink box. Clark leaves the gift there until the sweetness curdles in the room. Each gesture can pass, up close, as care. Then Kay reveals she is pregnant by him too, and the pattern finally bares its teeth. By then the story has tied food, sexual curiosity, maternal fantasy, and the ache of being singled out into one hard knot. When the girls skip school, clean Tevin out, and leave crumbs all over his apartment, the mess on the coffee table says more than any speech could.
Clark keeps rerunning the same crooked offer in better clothes. “Nutcracker” follows Shelly, a retail worker drawn toward the boys in the stockroom, where horseplay and assault blur into a ritual everyone pretends is normal. “Justin” begins with a girl waiting out her brother’s sex life in the kitchen and opens into a small bruised marvel about secret savings, escape plans, and the impossible dignity of trying to make a birthday cake when there are no eggs in the house. “If I See You First” gives us a college SpringFest that curdles into one of the book’s ugliest images: Jamilah unconscious on an attic floor, then later dumped over a fence by a fraternity boy who wants the problem off his lawn, not the woman restored to herself. “Candy Girl” catches a young singer, Juju, at the instant talent becomes packaging. Big Roy hears her voice, renames her, pays for her hair, and starts talking about her look before he has taught her anything else. “The Girl Gets Whatever She Wants” sends Chrissy to Atlantic City for her birthday and lets the promise of glamour harden into transaction, then into something worse: hunger in lip gloss, self-disgust in heels, the fantasy of agency already bent out of shape by money.
Clark catches class in the act of passing as taste. A full wash-and-set costs twenty-five dollars; a perm costs sixty. A pair of Uggs changes the angle at which the world looks back. So does the difference between Keds and new boots, between a weathered Craigslist couch and a suite with walls of windows, between the girl who can afford a better story about herself and the girl who has to invent one on the walk over. These rooms are not neutral. The school hallway, the dorm attic, the military-base kitchen, the casino suite, the winter bar, the cramped apartment with the blinds pulled shut: all of them do more than hold people. They sort, reward, expose, humiliate. The girls in these stories learn how to read rooms before they learn how to trust them.
Clark’s sentences travel light and still show up hauling class, shame, and want. The prose wastes very little motion. Its force comes from compression, placement, and the exact social weight of ordinary things. A Gushers packet, a vibrator, a pregnancy test, a cigarette, a hundred-dollar bill, a hotel robe, an eyeglasses case full of secret money: Clark knows how to load a small object with class pressure, erotic charge, or a bruise under fluorescent light without making it strain for importance. So does the dialogue. Wrong nicknames. Fake-generous offers. Flirtation that is already a test. Apologies that know exactly how cruel they have been. The style does not merely describe performance. It performs it: withholding, calibrating, pivoting, reading the room.
She can let a joke grow teeth in a breath. “Insults for Ugly Girls” is vicious and funny in the way teenage cruelty so often is, all internet spectatorship, body comparison, and the bored invention of hierarchy. “Red-Hot Door” begins with pious mothers protesting a tech company on a military base and turns into a sly story about pornography, curiosity, adult hypocrisy, and the thrill of wanting what you have been told should disgust you. Sadie’s mother fears the internet as a satanic corridor to corruption. The joke, and the point, is that temptation did not need broadband to exist. It needed a body, a closed door, a little shame, and the suspicion that the adults were enjoying better contradictions than the ones they preached.
Formally, the book does not climb so much as tighten. These stories are discrete, but their echoes are not accidental. Clark keeps arranging kitchens, hallways, bars, dorms, back seats, and bedrooms where the same bad bargain keeps changing outfits. Attention becomes possibility. Possibility curdles into compromise. Compromise ends in exposure, humiliation, or one hard little lesson about the arrangement you are actually in. Clark arranges these stories so that each early gift teaches you how to mistrust the next one. The early pages school you in the rules of chosen-ness: gift, access, debt, exposure. The later ones show what those rules do to adulthood.
By the time “Dark Times” arrives, you already know not to trust the room. K, wandering through Provincetown winter toward her former lover P, carries that knowledge with her. Their wine, their bar stop, the strange man with the little eye-shadow case of cocaine, the sudden wish to become something paintable, drownable, finally legible: the story opens the book out without letting it off the hook. It is one of the collection’s oddest and saddest pieces, and one of its most revealing. Clark understands that adulthood does not retire the old humiliations. It simply gives them better interiors, subtler language, and more expensive drinks.
Clark’s slyest move is her refusal to launder desire. She lets her characters want in ways that are embarrassing, strategic, horny, self-deceiving, practical, sentimental, and a little absurd. D’asia wants softness and gets a pink box. Shelly wants degradation and romance to turn out to be the same thing. Chrissy wants luxury, cash, and the feeling of having chosen her own night, even as that night closes in around her. Juju wants to sing and finds that the world first wants to decide what her hair should be doing. Netty wants confession to repair intimacy, and learns that truth does not instantly make anyone better at hearing. Clark is not writing about self-invention as liberation. She is writing about self-invention as a compromised necessity.
By the end, the book’s queer current is no longer ambient. It is structural. “Walks Like a Duck,” with its girls, guinea pigs, romance paperbacks, and awkward first kiss in a bad house, understands queer initiation not as banner moment but as confusion complicated by menace. “The Thing About You,” the closing story, is an especially shrewd final move. Netty comes out to her cousin G hoping that confession might restore some lost closeness. Instead she gets something messier and truer: a joke, a shrug, old hurt, and a mortifying road trip to meet an online girlfriend who may not exist. The story does not end with revelation in the heroic sense. It ends with kinship still imperfect, queer self-knowledge still crooked, and the old wish to be read correctly still sitting there in the car. The collection’s last movement is not toward spectacle but toward a quieter sadness: shared history does not guarantee clear sight.
That method does eventually send the bill. So many stories move through related circuits of attention, compromise, and exposure that the book occasionally risks mistaking recurrence for enlargement. Some men are drawn less as people than as pressures. That is not always a flaw, because for the women and girls at the center that is often exactly how such men arrive, but it remains a limit. Clark also likes to snap a story off at the hottest point. Often that works; she knows how to leave a scorch mark. Now and then, though, a piece cuts away the instant before reckoning might deepen into consequence. The result is a collection better at diagnosis than expansion.
Still, the wire stays live. One useful comparison is Danielle Evans’s “The Office of Historical Corrections,” not because the books resemble each other on the surface, but because both understand how private humiliations begin to read like social arrangements once enough of them have been set side by side. Clark’s texture is different: leaner, rougher, less interested in polish than in the little price tags tucked inside ordinary things.
The book knows the present’s cheap little hustles and has the good manners not to show off about how current it is. Its sense of now lives in cash, screens, hair appointments, wrong names, room upgrades, school rumors, and those tiny negotiations by which people decide how much of themselves to bring into view. Clark understands a world in which visibility spends like money, and often pays out badly. Her audience may be a room, a man, a label, a cousin, a lover with an easel and a bad habit of seeing everything but her.
At 86/100 – 4/5 stars – “All This Want (and I Can’t Get None)” is easy to admire and harder to get out of your system: a very good book, often an incisive one, not quite free of formal repetition, but too exact, too alert, to settle for mere competence. By the last page, the title has turned in the mouth. The ache begins in hunger, but it does not stay there. When something like what these characters want finally does arrive – attention, glamour, money, care, a stage name, a room key, a hand at the small of the back – it comes already tilted toward somebody else’s appetite. Clark’s sharpest move is to show that being chosen is not the opposite of being denied. Sometimes it is only the better-dressed version of the same old before-school hunger, knocking at the door in better shoes and smoother patter.
Early compositional studies testing how doorway, mirror, body, and negative space could hold the book’s tension between self-presentation and exposure.
The first skeletal map of the image, where the figure, threshold, and room are placed before atmosphere, color, and pressure begin to gather around them.
Palette studies drawn from the cover art, testing how pink, violet, orange, and near-black could carry the book’s charged mixture of allure, hunger, and threat.
The underdrawing begins to dissolve into mood as the first washes establish the room’s heat, its solitude, and its uneasy division between light and shadow.
Here the painting starts to claim its emotional architecture, with the dark doorway, figure silhouette, and main value masses locking the room into tension.
The image nearly arrives at its final stillness, with the central pressure already visible and only the last framing gestures left to close the room around her.
Border and lettering studies tracing how threshold, framing, title, and signature could be folded into the same charged visual language as the painting itself.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
T Clark’s “All This Want (and I Can’t Get None)” turns hunger, class aspiration, queer becoming, and sexual attention into a deadpan, devastating study of how recognition so often comes pre-contaminated.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 16th, 2026
A girl alone in the room where hunger, self-invention, and the dangerous terms of being seen begin to take on their shape.
Want, in T Clark’s “All This Want (and I Can’t Get None),” rarely arrives naked. It comes dressed for the occasion, hair fixed, smile rehearsed, line ready, posture adjusted, edges smoothed just enough for the room to clock it. These stories are full of appetite: for food, money, sex, glamour, safety, relief, a better room, a softer life. Clark is after the shabby work want has to do just to get answered at all. The book’s real subject is the labor of making desire legible: to a man, a room, a label, a family, a stranger behind a podium. More than a collection about girlhood, queer coming-of-age, or class aspiration, this is a book about performance as survival technology.
That is where the book stops asking permission. A lazier collection would let want explain itself. Clark has colder ideas. Here, wanting is stitched together under pressure. Her characters style, smooth, harden, rename. They flirt, joke, audition, posture, and lie their way toward whatever the world might briefly toss them. The trouble, comic and not, is that recognition so often arrives already tilted toward somebody else’s appetite: as a ride home, a hundred-dollar bill, a room upgrade, a proposition, a nickname that sounds like a promise until it starts to sound like a price.
The title story tightens before you quite notice the room has gone quiet. D’asia, thirteen, wakes up to expired milk, no eggs, no Bisquick, no breakfast, no time. Hunger here is not atmosphere. It is a growling-stomach problem, a kitchen problem, a daughter problem. Into that lack steps Tevin, the school security guard who talks to her “like I was a regular person,” gives her groceries, lets her crash on his couch, slips her lunch money, and eventually hands her a vibrator in a little pink box. Clark leaves the gift there until the sweetness curdles in the room. Each gesture can pass, up close, as care. Then Kay reveals she is pregnant by him too, and the pattern finally bares its teeth. By then the story has tied food, sexual curiosity, maternal fantasy, and the ache of being singled out into one hard knot. When the girls skip school, clean Tevin out, and leave crumbs all over his apartment, the mess on the coffee table says more than any speech could.
Clark keeps rerunning the same crooked offer in better clothes. “Nutcracker” follows Shelly, a retail worker drawn toward the boys in the stockroom, where horseplay and assault blur into a ritual everyone pretends is normal. “Justin” begins with a girl waiting out her brother’s sex life in the kitchen and opens into a small bruised marvel about secret savings, escape plans, and the impossible dignity of trying to make a birthday cake when there are no eggs in the house. “If I See You First” gives us a college SpringFest that curdles into one of the book’s ugliest images: Jamilah unconscious on an attic floor, then later dumped over a fence by a fraternity boy who wants the problem off his lawn, not the woman restored to herself. “Candy Girl” catches a young singer, Juju, at the instant talent becomes packaging. Big Roy hears her voice, renames her, pays for her hair, and starts talking about her look before he has taught her anything else. “The Girl Gets Whatever She Wants” sends Chrissy to Atlantic City for her birthday and lets the promise of glamour harden into transaction, then into something worse: hunger in lip gloss, self-disgust in heels, the fantasy of agency already bent out of shape by money.
Clark catches class in the act of passing as taste. A full wash-and-set costs twenty-five dollars; a perm costs sixty. A pair of Uggs changes the angle at which the world looks back. So does the difference between Keds and new boots, between a weathered Craigslist couch and a suite with walls of windows, between the girl who can afford a better story about herself and the girl who has to invent one on the walk over. These rooms are not neutral. The school hallway, the dorm attic, the military-base kitchen, the casino suite, the winter bar, the cramped apartment with the blinds pulled shut: all of them do more than hold people. They sort, reward, expose, humiliate. The girls in these stories learn how to read rooms before they learn how to trust them.
Clark’s sentences travel light and still show up hauling class, shame, and want. The prose wastes very little motion. Its force comes from compression, placement, and the exact social weight of ordinary things. A Gushers packet, a vibrator, a pregnancy test, a cigarette, a hundred-dollar bill, a hotel robe, an eyeglasses case full of secret money: Clark knows how to load a small object with class pressure, erotic charge, or a bruise under fluorescent light without making it strain for importance. So does the dialogue. Wrong nicknames. Fake-generous offers. Flirtation that is already a test. Apologies that know exactly how cruel they have been. The style does not merely describe performance. It performs it: withholding, calibrating, pivoting, reading the room.
She can let a joke grow teeth in a breath. “Insults for Ugly Girls” is vicious and funny in the way teenage cruelty so often is, all internet spectatorship, body comparison, and the bored invention of hierarchy. “Red-Hot Door” begins with pious mothers protesting a tech company on a military base and turns into a sly story about pornography, curiosity, adult hypocrisy, and the thrill of wanting what you have been told should disgust you. Sadie’s mother fears the internet as a satanic corridor to corruption. The joke, and the point, is that temptation did not need broadband to exist. It needed a body, a closed door, a little shame, and the suspicion that the adults were enjoying better contradictions than the ones they preached.
Formally, the book does not climb so much as tighten. These stories are discrete, but their echoes are not accidental. Clark keeps arranging kitchens, hallways, bars, dorms, back seats, and bedrooms where the same bad bargain keeps changing outfits. Attention becomes possibility. Possibility curdles into compromise. Compromise ends in exposure, humiliation, or one hard little lesson about the arrangement you are actually in. Clark arranges these stories so that each early gift teaches you how to mistrust the next one. The early pages school you in the rules of chosen-ness: gift, access, debt, exposure. The later ones show what those rules do to adulthood.
By the time “Dark Times” arrives, you already know not to trust the room. K, wandering through Provincetown winter toward her former lover P, carries that knowledge with her. Their wine, their bar stop, the strange man with the little eye-shadow case of cocaine, the sudden wish to become something paintable, drownable, finally legible: the story opens the book out without letting it off the hook. It is one of the collection’s oddest and saddest pieces, and one of its most revealing. Clark understands that adulthood does not retire the old humiliations. It simply gives them better interiors, subtler language, and more expensive drinks.
Clark’s slyest move is her refusal to launder desire. She lets her characters want in ways that are embarrassing, strategic, horny, self-deceiving, practical, sentimental, and a little absurd. D’asia wants softness and gets a pink box. Shelly wants degradation and romance to turn out to be the same thing. Chrissy wants luxury, cash, and the feeling of having chosen her own night, even as that night closes in around her. Juju wants to sing and finds that the world first wants to decide what her hair should be doing. Netty wants confession to repair intimacy, and learns that truth does not instantly make anyone better at hearing. Clark is not writing about self-invention as liberation. She is writing about self-invention as a compromised necessity.
By the end, the book’s queer current is no longer ambient. It is structural. “Walks Like a Duck,” with its girls, guinea pigs, romance paperbacks, and awkward first kiss in a bad house, understands queer initiation not as banner moment but as confusion complicated by menace. “The Thing About You,” the closing story, is an especially shrewd final move. Netty comes out to her cousin G hoping that confession might restore some lost closeness. Instead she gets something messier and truer: a joke, a shrug, old hurt, and a mortifying road trip to meet an online girlfriend who may not exist. The story does not end with revelation in the heroic sense. It ends with kinship still imperfect, queer self-knowledge still crooked, and the old wish to be read correctly still sitting there in the car. The collection’s last movement is not toward spectacle but toward a quieter sadness: shared history does not guarantee clear sight.
That method does eventually send the bill. So many stories move through related circuits of attention, compromise, and exposure that the book occasionally risks mistaking recurrence for enlargement. Some men are drawn less as people than as pressures. That is not always a flaw, because for the women and girls at the center that is often exactly how such men arrive, but it remains a limit. Clark also likes to snap a story off at the hottest point. Often that works; she knows how to leave a scorch mark. Now and then, though, a piece cuts away the instant before reckoning might deepen into consequence. The result is a collection better at diagnosis than expansion.
Still, the wire stays live. One useful comparison is Danielle Evans’s “The Office of Historical Corrections,” not because the books resemble each other on the surface, but because both understand how private humiliations begin to read like social arrangements once enough of them have been set side by side. Clark’s texture is different: leaner, rougher, less interested in polish than in the little price tags tucked inside ordinary things.
The book knows the present’s cheap little hustles and has the good manners not to show off about how current it is. Its sense of now lives in cash, screens, hair appointments, wrong names, room upgrades, school rumors, and those tiny negotiations by which people decide how much of themselves to bring into view. Clark understands a world in which visibility spends like money, and often pays out badly. Her audience may be a room, a man, a label, a cousin, a lover with an easel and a bad habit of seeing everything but her.
At 86/100 – 4/5 stars – “All This Want (and I Can’t Get None)” is easy to admire and harder to get out of your system: a very good book, often an incisive one, not quite free of formal repetition, but too exact, too alert, to settle for mere competence. By the last page, the title has turned in the mouth. The ache begins in hunger, but it does not stay there. When something like what these characters want finally does arrive – attention, glamour, money, care, a stage name, a room key, a hand at the small of the back – it comes already tilted toward somebody else’s appetite. Clark’s sharpest move is to show that being chosen is not the opposite of being denied. Sometimes it is only the better-dressed version of the same old before-school hunger, knocking at the door in better shoes and smoother patter.
Early compositional studies testing how doorway, mirror, body, and negative space could hold the book’s tension between self-presentation and exposure.
The first skeletal map of the image, where the figure, threshold, and room are placed before atmosphere, color, and pressure begin to gather around them.
Palette studies drawn from the cover art, testing how pink, violet, orange, and near-black could carry the book’s charged mixture of allure, hunger, and threat.
The underdrawing begins to dissolve into mood as the first washes establish the room’s heat, its solitude, and its uneasy division between light and shadow.
Here the painting starts to claim its emotional architecture, with the dark doorway, figure silhouette, and main value masses locking the room into tension.
The image nearly arrives at its final stillness, with the central pressure already visible and only the last framing gestures left to close the room around her.
Border and lettering studies tracing how threshold, framing, title, and signature could be folded into the same charged visual language as the painting itself.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
June 26, 2026
All This Want And I Can’t Get None by T Clark, I know this is a trending word but I have to use it there are so many things in this book that are problematic just off the top of my head and one story this girl can’t get enough of watching a video of another girl pulling out her nasty tampon and sucking on it… I wish I could tell you how that one ended but I didn’t finish reading that one and another book 2 college girls the only two black girls (I only mentioned the race or because it’s apropos to the story) I don’t know if they’re in a fraternity or just the only two black girls in the dorm I’m not sure but one of them Jamila she’s not so dependable so when she says she’s going to meet her friend for spring fest and doesn’t show up her friend isn’t that surprised Jamila likes to drink a lot likes to have lots of sex with boys and when her friend finds her at a fraternity party upstairs all she has on is her underwear so her friend and another girl gets her back to the dorm and her friend essentially nurses her back to health or watches her sleep off her drunk, (pick your own reason) then when Jamila wakes up from possibly being gang raped she acts like it is no big deal and is ready for the next party I don’t know what the point of the story was again IDK but that is the tone of a lot of these stories there was one story where the girl was saving up initially she started saving her money so she could go see this boy who moved to China that she was in love with but as she got older she decided she would use the money to see the world. even when the lights went out when they had no food she kept her money to herself, I really thought that one was turning out to be a really good story despite she had to wait in the kitchen while her brother banged girls from the neighborhood but they didn’t focus on that and if I had to pick a favorite I guess it would be that one although this one also just ended. I don’t know why when authors want to write stories about lesbians I’ve never seen it in a book about gay men but I definitely noticed in books about lesbians the relationships are twisted there’s desire for sexual relationships And they also act like lesbian women are so sexually potent that if they get turned on they instantly have to be gratified. This book is full of that not only that but no story in the book has a great ending it just ends. I wouldn’t say I’m a big fan of lesbian stories because I am just a fan of stories and if the summary interests me I will read it. unfortunately these stories are just ridiculous they make no sense the story about the tampon really made me miss the days when we would keep our ugly habits to ourselves and not wave the flag loud and proud that we are gross and don’t care who sees it. I really believe it’s things like this that is causing civility to go by the wayside. if this sounds like something you like to give it a listen her writing is good and it’s some cases the subject matter is even interesting but I like a story with the beginning of middle end and end not just the first two. #NetGalley, #TheBlindReviewer, #MyHonestReview,
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
First let me say that I love short stories and one of my favorites is The Secret Life of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw, but I really like T. Clark's All This Want (And I Can't Get None) as this was my first read by this author and I got the book as an advanced copy from Netgalley. What a voice and a breath of fresh air to read these stories. This collection feels like someone cracked open a neighborhood just outside NYC and let us walk through the hallways, bedrooms, sidewalks, and secrets of the girls, women, and nonbinary characters who live there. The stories are sharp, tender, messy, and full of that electric push and pull between who you were and who you’re trying to become. This author has a gift for capturing those small, loaded moments that say everything. One of my favorite lines comes from the story where a little sister watches her friend flirt with her older brother, being a moment that hits that perfect mix of cringe, curiosity, and coming‑of‑age awkwardness. It’s the kind of scene that feels like it could’ve happened on any block, but the author writes it with such affection that it sticks with you for a long time. Across the collection, the characters stumble into situations that are funny, risky, intimate, or just plain human: D’asia’s too close friendship with a school security guard, Chrissy’s impulsive detour into a hotel room with strangers, Juju being dressed up for a meeting she doesn’t fully understand. Even the quieter stories, like the woman looping past her ex’s window hoping to catch a glimpse of what she lost land with emotional weight. What ties everything together is the authors writing which has sharp sentences, a big heart, and an eye for the power dynamics humming underneath simple everyday interactions. These stories feel livedin, like you’re eavesdropping on real people trying to figure out desire, identity, and the rules no one ever actually explains. I await what's next on the horizon for this author. Love, love, loved these stories and I will spread the word about this book! #NETGALLEY
June 27, 2026
T Clark's debut story collection is a difficult, necessary, and genuinely accomplished piece of literary fiction. Set largely in a working-class neighborhood outside New York City, these twelve stories follow young Black girls, women, and nonbinary characters navigating the treacherous, often unguided passage from childhood into adulthood — a passage made considerably more dangerous by poverty, absent parental guidance, and the predatory adults who exploit both.
The collection does not soften what it depicts. Across these stories, young girls learn — far too early and through far too painful means — that their bodies can function as currency, traded not for genuine affection but for the basic needs and fleeting attention that affection is meant to represent. Several stories confront sexual exploitation and abuse directly and without euphemism, including the grooming of a young teenager by an adult in a position of trust, and a sexual assault whose aftermath is rendered with unflinching, devastating clarity. These are not easy stories to read, and they are not meant to be. What makes them so affecting — and so difficult — is that the writing is skilled enough to place the reader directly inside these moments as they unfold, with the immediacy of a witness rather than the distance of an observer.
Clark's prose is sharp, controlled, and unafraid, and the emotional honesty of these stories is never in question. This is fiction that bears witness to real and ongoing harm, and it does so with genuine literary skill rather than sensationalism. The collection earns the considerable praise it has already received from established literary voices, and it marks Clark as a writer of real and unflinching talent.
This is a 4 star collection — strong, urgent, and accomplished. It is also, by design, an unrelentingly heavy read, and prospective readers should know what they are walking into: this is fiction that confronts childhood sexual abuse and exploitation directly, and it does not offer the reader much in the way of relief or resolution.
The collection does not soften what it depicts. Across these stories, young girls learn — far too early and through far too painful means — that their bodies can function as currency, traded not for genuine affection but for the basic needs and fleeting attention that affection is meant to represent. Several stories confront sexual exploitation and abuse directly and without euphemism, including the grooming of a young teenager by an adult in a position of trust, and a sexual assault whose aftermath is rendered with unflinching, devastating clarity. These are not easy stories to read, and they are not meant to be. What makes them so affecting — and so difficult — is that the writing is skilled enough to place the reader directly inside these moments as they unfold, with the immediacy of a witness rather than the distance of an observer.
Clark's prose is sharp, controlled, and unafraid, and the emotional honesty of these stories is never in question. This is fiction that bears witness to real and ongoing harm, and it does so with genuine literary skill rather than sensationalism. The collection earns the considerable praise it has already received from established literary voices, and it marks Clark as a writer of real and unflinching talent.
This is a 4 star collection — strong, urgent, and accomplished. It is also, by design, an unrelentingly heavy read, and prospective readers should know what they are walking into: this is fiction that confronts childhood sexual abuse and exploitation directly, and it does not offer the reader much in the way of relief or resolution.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
All This Want (and I Can’t Get None) is as raw and uncomfortable as it is funny. T Clark announces themselves as a genuinely exciting new voice with this debut collection, exploring unruly desires, queer coming-of-age, and the realities of Black girlhood in ways that feel entangled, messy, and profound.
What Clark captures particularly well are the masks young people learn to wear when they're growing up without many opportunities, role models, or reasons to believe life might turn out differently. Across the collection, characters navigate dangerous situations, complicated relationships, and uncertain futures with little more than instinct, humour, and sheer stubbornness. The Chrissy stories embody this especially well. As she walks out into the cold at the end of one story, "She'd have to strut to keep warm. But she'd survive." It's a line that feels emblematic of the collection as a whole: bleak, funny, and quietly heroic.
My favourite stories were "Walk Like a Duck" and "Things About You," the latter a particular standout. The relationship between Netty and G crackles with warmth and humour, especially when Netty comes out and G immediately starts speculating about their grandfather: "Grandpa was a little saucy!" It's exactly the kind of moment Clark excels at, funny and affectionate on the surface while revealing something deeper about family, identity, and belonging.
Short stories demand a particular precision from a writer, and Clark clearly possesses it. Again and again, they build entire worlds from brief conversations, fleeting encounters, and seemingly ordinary moments. Not every story resonated equally with me, but the strongest offer vivid, prismatic glimpses into lives defined by longing, survival, desire, and the search for connection.
This is a confident debut from a writer with a distinctive voice, and I'll be eager to see what they do next.
Thank you to Random House | One World for the arc via NetGalley. #pudseyrecommends
What Clark captures particularly well are the masks young people learn to wear when they're growing up without many opportunities, role models, or reasons to believe life might turn out differently. Across the collection, characters navigate dangerous situations, complicated relationships, and uncertain futures with little more than instinct, humour, and sheer stubbornness. The Chrissy stories embody this especially well. As she walks out into the cold at the end of one story, "She'd have to strut to keep warm. But she'd survive." It's a line that feels emblematic of the collection as a whole: bleak, funny, and quietly heroic.
My favourite stories were "Walk Like a Duck" and "Things About You," the latter a particular standout. The relationship between Netty and G crackles with warmth and humour, especially when Netty comes out and G immediately starts speculating about their grandfather: "Grandpa was a little saucy!" It's exactly the kind of moment Clark excels at, funny and affectionate on the surface while revealing something deeper about family, identity, and belonging.
Short stories demand a particular precision from a writer, and Clark clearly possesses it. Again and again, they build entire worlds from brief conversations, fleeting encounters, and seemingly ordinary moments. Not every story resonated equally with me, but the strongest offer vivid, prismatic glimpses into lives defined by longing, survival, desire, and the search for connection.
This is a confident debut from a writer with a distinctive voice, and I'll be eager to see what they do next.
Thank you to Random House | One World for the arc via NetGalley. #pudseyrecommends
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Thank you NetGalley for providing a free Advanced Reader Copy in exchange for an honest review.
The title of this short story collection perfectly encapsulates the theme off each narrative. Each narrator is consumed by their wants; the gifts they have, the stability they could enjoy is a burden to be renounced. Under a hormonal blaze, and away from proper parental supervision, our protagonists discard their authentic selves like old moth-eaten sweaters. Their eyes are on the colorful, gaudy, lustful, and harmful experiences all the cool kids have. They torpedo their futures with glee, if that means they get to be wanted and less alone.
I empathized a lot with the adolescent protagonists. Having grown up on the edge of the internet age, I recognized myself in several of them: the teacher's pet with a small number of good friends craving the attention of the popular boys, worried that everyone is growing up so fast while I'm unable to shed my childhood, worried that their experiences will never be mine. The twisted non-sensical ways a teenage mind works was perfectly captured on the page by the author. I read some reviews describing the protagonists as unlikable--I couldn't disagree more. They are lonely individuals navigating the dangerous currents of late adolescence and early adulthood without proper support. Each story is a cry for help unheard.
I particularly loved the first two stories. Each story has an Alice Munro quality about them--they understate the experience and often leave the reader hanging right above the precipice of a disastrous future. The collection is cohesive, although after a while I found the stories to be a bit repetitive. Overall I really liked the writing style and dialogue. 3.5 stars rounded up.
The title of this short story collection perfectly encapsulates the theme off each narrative. Each narrator is consumed by their wants; the gifts they have, the stability they could enjoy is a burden to be renounced. Under a hormonal blaze, and away from proper parental supervision, our protagonists discard their authentic selves like old moth-eaten sweaters. Their eyes are on the colorful, gaudy, lustful, and harmful experiences all the cool kids have. They torpedo their futures with glee, if that means they get to be wanted and less alone.
I empathized a lot with the adolescent protagonists. Having grown up on the edge of the internet age, I recognized myself in several of them: the teacher's pet with a small number of good friends craving the attention of the popular boys, worried that everyone is growing up so fast while I'm unable to shed my childhood, worried that their experiences will never be mine. The twisted non-sensical ways a teenage mind works was perfectly captured on the page by the author. I read some reviews describing the protagonists as unlikable--I couldn't disagree more. They are lonely individuals navigating the dangerous currents of late adolescence and early adulthood without proper support. Each story is a cry for help unheard.
I particularly loved the first two stories. Each story has an Alice Munro quality about them--they understate the experience and often leave the reader hanging right above the precipice of a disastrous future. The collection is cohesive, although after a while I found the stories to be a bit repetitive. Overall I really liked the writing style and dialogue. 3.5 stars rounded up.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Short story collections are always a little difficult to rate because there's almost always a mix of stories that really work and others that don't quite hit the mark. That was definitely the case for me with All This Want (And I Can't Get None). Even so, I closed the book feeling like I'd spent time with an author whose work I want to read again.
The strongest part of this collection was how honestly it captured that strange stage between adolescence and adulthood. You're old enough to think you know who you are, but young enough to realise the world has other ideas. T Clark explores that uncertainty through characters who are messy, vulnerable, sometimes impulsive, and often just trying to find somewhere they belong.
I also liked that nobody here was written as either wholly good or wholly bad. People make poor decisions, cross boundaries, hurt one another and sometimes themselves, but it all felt grounded in circumstance rather than written for shock value. That gave the collection a realism I appreciated.
Overall, this was an engaging debut that captures the confusion, longing and uncertainty of growing up, particularly for young Black and queer people finding their place in the world. Not every story was a favourite, but together they created a collection that felt thoughtful, honest and well worth reading. I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for whatever T Clark writes next.
Thank you to NetGalley and Random House | One World for providing me with an eARC in exchange for my honest review.
The strongest part of this collection was how honestly it captured that strange stage between adolescence and adulthood. You're old enough to think you know who you are, but young enough to realise the world has other ideas. T Clark explores that uncertainty through characters who are messy, vulnerable, sometimes impulsive, and often just trying to find somewhere they belong.
I also liked that nobody here was written as either wholly good or wholly bad. People make poor decisions, cross boundaries, hurt one another and sometimes themselves, but it all felt grounded in circumstance rather than written for shock value. That gave the collection a realism I appreciated.
Overall, this was an engaging debut that captures the confusion, longing and uncertainty of growing up, particularly for young Black and queer people finding their place in the world. Not every story was a favourite, but together they created a collection that felt thoughtful, honest and well worth reading. I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for whatever T Clark writes next.
Thank you to NetGalley and Random House | One World for providing me with an eARC in exchange for my honest review.
June 23, 2026
In what is sure to become a modern-day classic, author T. Clark’s short story collection All This Want (And I Can’t Get None) is an ode to the everyday struggles of the unheard and the overlooked—a status assigned by society’s more powerful figures to some characters and strategically worn as a cloak of protection by others. As main character and narrator in the first and titular story, D’asia, frets to herself, “I feel stupider than ever; my mind is static and jumbled, and I must look like I don’t have a clue.” Shainey does not yet explicitly understand Jamilah’s nonchalant attitude about being photographed nude while unconscious in “If I See You First,” and while Natari’s open admiration of Roy in “Candy Girl” is clearly effective, it only makes Juju feel confused and uncomfortable. Clark’s protagonists, at times just shy of unreliable, are prone to excessive observation of those around them and tend to possess a dangerous combination of a little too much naïveté and not quite enough understanding. Some unnameable something is always just out of their reach. Those around them—usually considered friends and often exuding sex appeal, but prone to strategically undefined social interactions—often employ ill-begotten street smarts to take advantage of such grasping desperation the moment they detect it. While not quite vignettes, Clark’s stories leave readers wondering, wanting—and that seems to be the point.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
In "All This Want (and I Can't Get None)", author T. Clark takes on multiple perspectives and voices in her collection of short stories, many of them centering on themes of coming-of-age, poverty, identity, gender, and sexuality - many of these told from the perspective of young black girls at the precipice of adulthood.
For me, the stories that lingered with me most were ones that revolved around family and sexuality; when a young black girl and her older brother take in the upstairs neighbor in the midst of a snowstorm, only to discover the lie he told; when two young friends question and explore their own identities and sexualities; and when a father leaves work for his son's birthday party, knowing he will need to meet his wife and her new husband at it. The works are gritty, veering into dark and uncomfortable, but shine a glaring light onto the reality of what growing up black is like - especially for those in marginalized communities and areas. T. Clark does a fantastic job taking on different voices and writing styles, and at time I wondered if I was reading works by the same writer.
I will note this is not a book for everyone; some of the topics veer into difficult and sensitive areas, and there were times I had to skip or speedread sections.
For me, the stories that lingered with me most were ones that revolved around family and sexuality; when a young black girl and her older brother take in the upstairs neighbor in the midst of a snowstorm, only to discover the lie he told; when two young friends question and explore their own identities and sexualities; and when a father leaves work for his son's birthday party, knowing he will need to meet his wife and her new husband at it. The works are gritty, veering into dark and uncomfortable, but shine a glaring light onto the reality of what growing up black is like - especially for those in marginalized communities and areas. T. Clark does a fantastic job taking on different voices and writing styles, and at time I wondered if I was reading works by the same writer.
I will note this is not a book for everyone; some of the topics veer into difficult and sensitive areas, and there were times I had to skip or speedread sections.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
4 stars
This collection had me in the same place often: wanting to carefully but clearly guide characters away from their current thoughts, decisions, and paths. Coming of age requires growth and mistakes, and these characters are exploring these avenues thoroughly.
Some of these installments provoked some serious discomfort, and while that's the point, it still impacts who I'll recommend this collection to, so if you are a prospective reader who is sensitive to content warnings that may apply to a collection. featuring young women and nonbinary folks who are coming of age, well, proceed with caution.
Folks who can handle this content should expect to be frustrated with some characters, concerned for many, and intrigued by the gritty realism of these different life stages. I enjoyed these characters and their perspectives, even when I found them tough to stomach or really began to worry for them. This is my first experience with T Clark, but I'll aim for many more.
*Special thanks to NetGalley and Ericka Serrano at One World/RHPG for this widget, which I received in exchange for an honest review. The opinions expressed here are my own.
This collection had me in the same place often: wanting to carefully but clearly guide characters away from their current thoughts, decisions, and paths. Coming of age requires growth and mistakes, and these characters are exploring these avenues thoroughly.
Some of these installments provoked some serious discomfort, and while that's the point, it still impacts who I'll recommend this collection to, so if you are a prospective reader who is sensitive to content warnings that may apply to a collection. featuring young women and nonbinary folks who are coming of age, well, proceed with caution.
Folks who can handle this content should expect to be frustrated with some characters, concerned for many, and intrigued by the gritty realism of these different life stages. I enjoyed these characters and their perspectives, even when I found them tough to stomach or really began to worry for them. This is my first experience with T Clark, but I'll aim for many more.
*Special thanks to NetGalley and Ericka Serrano at One World/RHPG for this widget, which I received in exchange for an honest review. The opinions expressed here are my own.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
All This Want [and I Can’t Get None] Stories by T. Clark
Pub Date: June 23/26 TY @RandomHouse and @oneworldbooks
A short story collection that celebrates the messiness of coming of age of Black girlhood. Vibrant and insightful, these stories explore the complexity of desire and sexuality, friendship, identity and the masks we wear. The cast is wide ranging, including heterosexual, queer and nonbinary characters which adds variety and layered depth to the collection.
As with any short story collection, some stories resonated more strongly with me than others. Still, overall Clark’s writing is vibrant, unflinching, humorous and compassionate. Her examination of Black girl’s sexuality is honest and fresh, an important contribution in a world that too often sexualizes young Black girls. These stories feel like a reclaiming of their voices.
Clark describes the cover as suggesting secrets, hidden truths, distraction. The moment before you step out and make yourself known. Or the moment you decide to stay hidden instead.
I think this is a perfect description of these stories. A smart, thoughtful and funny collection and an amazing debut.
Pub Date: June 23/26 TY @RandomHouse and @oneworldbooks
A short story collection that celebrates the messiness of coming of age of Black girlhood. Vibrant and insightful, these stories explore the complexity of desire and sexuality, friendship, identity and the masks we wear. The cast is wide ranging, including heterosexual, queer and nonbinary characters which adds variety and layered depth to the collection.
As with any short story collection, some stories resonated more strongly with me than others. Still, overall Clark’s writing is vibrant, unflinching, humorous and compassionate. Her examination of Black girl’s sexuality is honest and fresh, an important contribution in a world that too often sexualizes young Black girls. These stories feel like a reclaiming of their voices.
Clark describes the cover as suggesting secrets, hidden truths, distraction. The moment before you step out and make yourself known. Or the moment you decide to stay hidden instead.
I think this is a perfect description of these stories. A smart, thoughtful and funny collection and an amazing debut.
June 28, 2026
3.5 rounded up.
T Clark does a great job of capturing the exhilarating, and sometimes painful, fragility that comes along with youth. There is no romanticizing here, instead Clark portrays it as a period defined by restless longing, uncertainty, and the desperate search for identity and belonging. The characters' mistakes and contradictions feel authentic, making their emotional journeys all the more compelling. It doesn't shy away from making you a little uncomfortable, which feels fitting for a stage of life marked by constant change.
This is a coming-of-age story that trusts its readers to sit with complexity. Thoughtful, honest, and beautifully written, All This Want and I Can't Get None is a moving exploration of what it means to grow up when every feeling seems enormous and every choice feels permanent.
Thank you to Net Galley for the ARC!
T Clark does a great job of capturing the exhilarating, and sometimes painful, fragility that comes along with youth. There is no romanticizing here, instead Clark portrays it as a period defined by restless longing, uncertainty, and the desperate search for identity and belonging. The characters' mistakes and contradictions feel authentic, making their emotional journeys all the more compelling. It doesn't shy away from making you a little uncomfortable, which feels fitting for a stage of life marked by constant change.
This is a coming-of-age story that trusts its readers to sit with complexity. Thoughtful, honest, and beautifully written, All This Want and I Can't Get None is a moving exploration of what it means to grow up when every feeling seems enormous and every choice feels permanent.
Thank you to Net Galley for the ARC!
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Disappointing - multiple examples of people having to rush to the toilet to self satisfy, multiple examples of comparing same sex attraction to parental love or care, multiple stories with people in the closet or in denial, of teen girls whose big dreams are becoming teen mom's, lots of internalized homophobia & ofc the regular societal kind. I truly would have DNF'D if I didn't feel obligated to review all stories in a collection for a fair review. In 2026 writing about weak women feels lazy.
This book blurb states this collection will explore what it means to grow into yourself when the world keeps insisting on something else. This book is like a constant running commercial of it gets better later.
This book blurb states this collection will explore what it means to grow into yourself when the world keeps insisting on something else. This book is like a constant running commercial of it gets better later.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
All This Want (and I Can't Get None) is the kind of short story collection that sneaks up on you. T. Clark has a sharp eye for human behavior, and each story feels like a glimpse into a life that is both specific and surprisingly universal. The writing is confident and engaging, with moments of humor, vulnerability, and insight woven throughout.
What stood out to me most was the emotional range of the collection. Some stories left me smiling, others left me a little unsettled, but all of them felt purposeful and memorable. Even when the characters make questionable choices, they feel real enough that you can't help but stay invested. This is a collection that rewards slowing down and sitting with each story before moving on to the next.
What stood out to me most was the emotional range of the collection. Some stories left me smiling, others left me a little unsettled, but all of them felt purposeful and memorable. Even when the characters make questionable choices, they feel real enough that you can't help but stay invested. This is a collection that rewards slowing down and sitting with each story before moving on to the next.
June 10, 2026
these stories cut deeply and with startling precision. They explore, hunger, desire, and self presentation and the cost of those appetites for Young Queer Black Women in cities and in church shrouded towns. I recognized a lot of the girls and women I have grown up with or been related to and found the starting and ending stories with their depictions of predatory or just deeply disinterested adult figures and the way that queerness existing across multiple family members doesn’t and can’t erase the damage of fractured relationships particularly stunning.
Review copy received through NetGalley, opinions, mine.
Review copy received through NetGalley, opinions, mine.
June 24, 2026
That was a good collection of stories. T. Clark knows how to make gripping short stories that leaves you feeling the right amount of enjoyment or curiosity without feeling unfinished or overcomplicated for a short.
I like that the stories majorly centered black or queer characters and the vast quantity of different topics the author delved into was really refreshing. There were some intense ones, and others that didn’t have explosive topics but were interestingly written and set up.
I didn’t know much about the author, but this book was a good read and made me want to read more from them in the future!
*ARC copy received by the publisher in exchange for an honest review*
I like that the stories majorly centered black or queer characters and the vast quantity of different topics the author delved into was really refreshing. There were some intense ones, and others that didn’t have explosive topics but were interestingly written and set up.
I didn’t know much about the author, but this book was a good read and made me want to read more from them in the future!
*ARC copy received by the publisher in exchange for an honest review*
June 11, 2026
This collection seemed interesting and I am glad I read it. It started out strong and I devoured the book.
The collected stories covered a range of topics, including queerness, family, friendships, desire, and inappropriate relationships, among others.
There was one story that didn’t feel up to the caliber of the others (to me), but overall I’m a fan of this author and will definitely read more from them.
My thanks to Random House, One World, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this advance copy in return for my honest opinion.
(4/5 stars)
The collected stories covered a range of topics, including queerness, family, friendships, desire, and inappropriate relationships, among others.
There was one story that didn’t feel up to the caliber of the others (to me), but overall I’m a fan of this author and will definitely read more from them.
My thanks to Random House, One World, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this advance copy in return for my honest opinion.
(4/5 stars)
Review of advance copy received from Author
Absolutely dynamite collection of short stories that left me wanting, hungry, scared--and satisfied with all of my questions and wonder. T. Clark is an incredible writer who drags you by the hand, right to the brink, and lets go. And there you are staring at a canyon, or a starless night sky, or your own hurt loud in the mirror. This is really a no skips album of a short story collection. I'm beyond impressed, and moved too.
June 23, 2026
3.5/5 I really enjoyed the variety of the stories - each was its own unique premise and had fairly rich characters. However, almost all of them felt like the story could have gone one step further - almost unfinished at times. The writing was good and I would be interested in reading more from this author, but wish there had been a bit more in this collection! Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.
June 27, 2026
Special thanks to NetGalley and Random House for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
I absolutely flew through this book. I’m not usually a huge fan of short stories, but this collection was well done and strangely cohesive despite the different explored topics.
My only wishes were that we had a few more stories featuring adults and a few different settings.
Overall, I would recommend!
I absolutely flew through this book. I’m not usually a huge fan of short stories, but this collection was well done and strangely cohesive despite the different explored topics.
My only wishes were that we had a few more stories featuring adults and a few different settings.
Overall, I would recommend!
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I received an ARC for this book from NetGalley for free.
As far as short story collections go this was a mixed bag. Some of the stories lacked direction and after reading them they felt very unfulfilling. I thought the stand out stories were the ones that revolved around sexual identity. Overall a fine short story collection and I’m interested to see what the author comes up next.
As far as short story collections go this was a mixed bag. Some of the stories lacked direction and after reading them they felt very unfulfilling. I thought the stand out stories were the ones that revolved around sexual identity. Overall a fine short story collection and I’m interested to see what the author comes up next.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
T. Clark's ability to present fully fleshed out characters in a limited number of pages is a gift I want to keep enjoying. I'm picky when it comes to short stories, but Clark delivered with their clear yet evocative storytelling. Very readable and I was immersed in each story, even though they were so short.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
It eats.
June 27, 2026
This collection of short stories pulled me in and didn't let me go! I loved it.
June 18, 2026
3.75⭐️
A short story collection exploring the lives of black girls as they navigate sex, queerness, identity, abuse, strength and more.
Growing up as a young person can be difficult, but when you add in identity, race, sexuality and a world that makes being who you want to be, it’s near impossible. At times, the stories were uncomfortable but necessary, while others were frustrating. But throughout, there is a small sense of hope underneath it all. Beautiful humans discovering who they want to be or have to be, each with unique personalities and emotions. A great collection, each story is impactful.
A short story collection exploring the lives of black girls as they navigate sex, queerness, identity, abuse, strength and more.
Growing up as a young person can be difficult, but when you add in identity, race, sexuality and a world that makes being who you want to be, it’s near impossible. At times, the stories were uncomfortable but necessary, while others were frustrating. But throughout, there is a small sense of hope underneath it all. Beautiful humans discovering who they want to be or have to be, each with unique personalities and emotions. A great collection, each story is impactful.
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