Monster in the Middle

by Tiphanie Yanique

“ Reveals on every page how love can persevere and take shape over time and space.”— Boston Globe

"Transporting and deeply emotional.” — Glamour

“ One of the most inventive and talented stylists of her generation.” — Vulture

From the award-winning author of Land of Love and Drowning , an electric new novel that maps the emotional inheritance of one couple newly in love.

When Fly and Stela meet in 21st Century New York City, it seems like fate. He's a Black American musician from a mixed-religious background who knows all about heartbreak. She’s a Catholic science teacher from the Caribbean, looking for lasting love. But are they meant to be? The answer goes back decades—all the way to their parents' earliest loves.

Vibrant and emotionally riveting, Monster in the Middle moves across decades, from the U.S. to the Virgin Islands to Ghana and back again, to show how one couple's romance is intrinsically influenced by the family lore and love stories that preceded their own pairing. What challenges and traumas must this new couple inherit, what hopes and ambitions will keep them moving forward? Exploring desire and identity, religion and class, passion and obligation, the novel posits that in order to answer the question “who are we meant to be with?” we must first understand who we are and how we came to be.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Romance, Contemporary, Adult Fiction, Audiobook, Race

288 pages, Hardcover

First published October 19, 2021

About the author

Tiphanie Yanique is the author of How to Escape from a Leper Colony. She has won the Boston Review Prize in Fiction, a Pushcart Prize a Fulbright in Creative Writing and an Academy of American Poet's Prize. Her work has also appeared in Callaloo, Transition Magazine, American Short Fiction, & the London Magazine. She is an assistant professor of creative writing & Caribbean Literature at Drew University. The Boston Globe listed her as one of sixteen cultural figures to watch out for in 2010."

Reviews

[luce (cry bebè's back from hiatus) · Rating 2 out of 5]

A week or so before reading Monster in the Middle I read Tiphanie Yanique’s debut short story collection, Land of Love and Drowning, which I rather enjoyed. I remember being struck by Yanique ’s atmospheric storytelling, by her subtle use of irony, and by her thoughtful meditations on death, love, and everything in between. So, given that I have been known to have a soft spot for intergenerational dramas/interconnected storylines (The Vanishing Half, Commonwealth, The Travelers) I was fully convinced that I would love Monster in the Middle.
Albeit confusing, the opening chapter intrigued me. But with each subsequent point of view, I become increasingly aware of just how disjointed and directionless this book was.
Monster in the Middle tells the love story between Fly and Stela, he’s American and a musician, she’s a science teacher from the Caribbean. Yanique jazzes things up by making their romance, not the starting point of the novel but the very end goal. The storylines leading to their romance give us a glimpse into their parents’ lives and later on Fly and Stela's own experiences as teenagers and young adults.

The novel opens with a chapter on Fly's father. He and a white girl are running away together, or so it seems. She comes from a deeply religious family and he too is religious. Fly’s father also suffers from schizophrenia but at this point in his life, he believes that the voices he hears are from God. A chapter from Fly’s mother follows, and here we don’t really gain much insight into what had happened to Fly’s father or that girl. She tells us a bit of their marriage but in a way that didn’t come across as engaging or particularly realistic. The following chapters are about Fly as a teen and his college experiences. I hated that the author focuses so much on Fly feeling horny and whatnot. He eventually comes across a sex tape starring his father and that girl he was briefly with. This tape becomes a guilt secret, as he is ashamed of being turned on by it. He masturbates a lot, which, good for him I guess but I personally could have also done without those scenes (it reminded me of What's Mine and Yours, where the sections focusing on the teenage boy character are all about him having boners). Fly’s character in these chapters is reduced to his sexuality.
In college, he gets involved with a really religious girl and this character made no sense whatsoever. I found it corny that she was singing or praying while they were being intimate with each other and that she has such a disconcerting approach to sex (it is implied that she ‘uses’ her body to make people straight…?!). Because of course, she would be like that.

Then we get to know about Stela’s mother. Again, there was something off-putting about the characters and the relationships they formed with each other. Same thing for Stela's father, who is not her biological father (other than that i can’t recall anything about him). Stela eventually comes to the fore and surprise surprise even if her chapters also hone in on her teen years, she isn’t made into a one-dimensional horny adolescent. She grows up in Saint Thomas and eventually goes to study abroad in Ghana where she is the victim of a sexual assault. Years later she marries this blandish guy and then they both, unbeknown to each other, become involved with the same woman. I absolutely hated this storyline. It feeds into existing cliches about bisexual women and it made no bloody sense. I had a hard time believing that this ‘other’ woman would be so deceitful. Then again, the story implies that she is deceitful by nature as she also lies about her background to them. Anyway, at long last Fly and Stela meet and I felt absolutely nothing. I didn’t feel for either character and found them very much devoid of fleshed-out personalities. They merely served as plot propellers, enabling the author to give us some superficial love stories and some observations on multicultural and/or interracial relationships. These brief glimpses into the mc’s parents lives did not make them into particularly well-developed characters, quite the opposite. They felt a bit all over the place, as some chapters, such as the 1st one, hone in on a very specific episode, while others have a vaguer timeline.
While the story addresses important issues, it did so rather superficially. Towards the end, the narrative includes covid and the BLM movement but it does so in a rather rushed way. I would have liked less focus on the characters’ sex lives and more moments of introspection.

The writing could also be rather off-putting with cringey lines like: "When he put his hand to her there at the center, she pressed herself hard against him, and she was slick. It made him think of candy gone sticky in the sun."; "his penis hard and curved, her vagina sticky and warm. They presented these things to each other like treasures: “So smooth,” she said to his; “So sweet,” he said to hers."; "The primary thing in his life was the ocean of this woman’s insides.".

Additionally, I did not particularly care for the way the author 'dealt' with the rape storyline. And we get some problematic lines such as: "Jerome was flirting, she knew, but he was seventeen and she, frankly, was susceptible at twenty-three." and "Stela looked around and saw an empty easel erect in a corner. She wished she had a dick. She wanted to be inside this bitch of a woman.".

Overall, I could not bring myself to like this book. This novel lacked the strongly rendered setting of Land of Love and Drowning and, moreover, the author's style was too florid for me. I couldn't take a lot of what I was reading seriously.


find me on: ❀ blog ❀ thestorygraph ❀ letterboxd ❀ tumblr ❀ ko-fi ❀

[BookOfCinz · Rating 3 out of 5]

When you meet your love, you are meeting all the people who ever loved them or who were supposed to love them but didnt love them enough or, hell, didnt love them at all.

This a love story, but not your usual love story. We meet the two lovers after meeting their entire family line and getting a look at how they both ended up where they are... meeting each other in New York City in 2021. This book is a great mash up of Homegoing, The Vanishing Half, Open Water and Transcendent Kingdom

Tiphanie Yanique's writing is impeccable, I was immediately pulled into the story about Fly and Stela, specifically their back story. As reader, I LOVE the backstory about our main characters and that is exactly where Yanique took this love story. You get to see how and why they behave they do and if they are perfectly suited for each other. I will say, because of this technique I was more invested in the back story than the actual love story. I wanted to know more about the father and why he insisted on having his ex white girlfriend photo on the family wall. I wanted more information on Stela's mom second husband and her life after Martin.

So much is explored in this book, racism, religion, immigration, love, forgiveness, marriage, unfaithfulness and regret. I really enjoyed how religion was dealt with, we see Evangelical dating taking place, how growing up in the church changes you and how you change after leaving the church.

I think the novel could have benefitted from be more direct, it felt a bit all over the place in certain parts. The ending was a bit "what the..." why was that even included... however, overall I think it would be a great read, especially because its a book I cannot ever remember reading.

[Kara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a lovely read for a quiet morning or a rainy day indoors. Or you could get lost in it against the backdrop of a busy café.

I don't want to reduce it to a book full of men performing casual violence towards women, but that theme does color so many of the pages. Within we also find the Black men who made up 14% of the vote in support of 45 in 2016 and then 12% in 2020. Suddenly they're flesh and blood, no longer a mere number on a screen. Something about that makes the real-life betrayal even worse.

The writing is lyrical, like a slow-moving stream that ebbs and flows. I love slice-of-life fiction like this where the most ordinary of experiences are pregnant with feeling.

[Jessica Reads It · Rating 3 out of 5]

I must admit, I was quite at a loss as to how to properly articulate myself as Monster in the Middle caught me completely off-guard. Initially, I tried penning my feelings but those were in even greater disarray than my thoughts. I pondered, "How to express this feeling of uncertainty, this feeling of being whole but hollow on the inside, this feeling of fleeting euphoria?" and I realized- That's life!

At its core, Monster in the Middle is life molded into a raw, messy, and terrifyingly brilliant story that chronicles the many manifestations of love. There are so many powerful themes (interracial love, racism, immigration, marriage, drugs, rape, sickness, war, cowardice, bravery, mental illness, death) interwoven within the story that married together in perfect synergy. This is also a brilliant representation of the combative but cohesive nature of spirituality, religion, and the power of belief.

It is said that we choose the path we walk on, and while I agree with this, the author proposes an interesting perspective for readers to ponder which is simply the domino effect that your history can have in molding you and the influence it can hold on the path you've selected? Are the decisions of our formative years, not a mirror of the life we were exposed to?

To me, Monster in the Middle is not so much a love story but rather an explorative journey with Fly and Stela as the destination. While I prefer the intricacies of the backstories and its dynamics over the eclectic eventuality of the story there is something to be said about the raw intensity of Yaniques writing. I can't say I connected with Fly and Stela but the echoes of the intent resonated with me- know yourself before you seek love.

There is no doubt that Tiphanie Yanique is an astounding writer and I believe there is purity in the truth of Monster in the Middle that is echoed throughout the pages.

Thank you to the kind folks over at Penguin Random House/Riverhead Books for providing me with an arc.

[Sanchari Sur · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book, I really did. It has some compelling Black female voices I have ever read. However, its representation of disability did me in. Much of this representation is problematic. Gary’s schizophrenia is consistently referred to as “crazy,” “crazy-brained,” and “lunatic” by both Fly and Ellenora. His “hearing of voices” is mostly left untreated and tolerated by his family. When Gary does turn to medication later in his life, he decides to separate from Ellenora. This seems to suggest that Gary’s bonding to his family was through trauma as a result of his mental illness, and once the illness is managed, the bond too disintegrates. Similarly, Ellenora’s father is depicted as carrying a cane, a visible marker of disability. However, the cane becomes an object of discipline and violence, when he uses it to beat Ellenora’s sister, Jenelle, for staying out too late, and later, for getting pregnant as a teenager. He also beats her son, Brent, to discipline him, enough to have the young boy “[d]isplay… a long scar on his lower back like a war wound”. When Fly visits his grandfather at the age of ten, he too quakes at the sight of the cane, an object that functions as a prop: “He walked with his cane, even though the whole of Soulsville knew that Pop didn’t need that cane for walking.” While the revelation points to Pop’s deception and desire for control, the timing of it makes it an unnecessary shock-value moment using a visible marker of disability as a prop and tool for violence. Stela’s biological father, Martin, too takes his life as a result of untreated depression, as if that's the only viable conclusion to dealing with depression. And finally, Fly also displays depression and suicidal ideation, both becoming manageable only through drug use. His fear of becoming “crazy” like Gary leads him into drug consumption from an extremely early age, demonizing both drug use and mental illness in the process.

There were other issues too, but representation of disability was the biggest one for me. Perhaps, having the manuscript read by a sensitivity reader prior to publication could have mitigated this.

[Josh Caporale · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read Monster in the Middle for a new book club that I am joining in which the month's theme is Caribbean literature. I am not sure if I considered this as one of the nominees that I would have went ahead with selecting. Here and now, I say steer away! The initial concept that is offered by the blurb seems to be general, but bearable, in which a black musician named Fly and a Caribbean science teacher for a Catholic college named Stela come together from different backgrounds and form a bond that was meant to be. While it took a direction that I felt was a bit more original, I almost wish it reflected its blurb instead, because the route that we took was aggravating. I do not like books where just about every character is self-righteous and want us to believe they are multidimensional when we simply just get lost in their structural gobbledy-guck.

How is this story structured anyway? Well, this book is split into three parts. The first part follows Earl "Fly" Lovett's parents, the ever immersed, inconsistently religious Gary and his long-suffering wife, Eleanora, also known as "Ellie." At the beginning of the book, Gary is in a relationship with a white girl named Eloise, whom he cannot get over and still passively longs for despite the fact she abandoned him. The second part follows Maristela (known better by "Stela") and her coming of age. It is only in the third part of 47 pages in which Fly and Stela come together during the year of 2020, in which the background is inaccurately depicted (specifically the first chapter). The one thing to keep in mind about this book is that every chapter in this book was released separately in a magazine or anthology, such as The New Yorker, The Harvard Review, The Best American Short Stories, among other outlets. They were tweaked up a bit in order to fit this novel format. You can tell that an effort was made for this book to flow, but it failed. You can tell that these were published in many different outlets and how it made it to so many is beyond me.

I had a hard time with this book for so many different reasons. The most evident being the characters. Aside from maybe Johann, Stela's boyfriend while living in St. Thomas, being a go-getter hit square in the face by the harsh realities of our world and our mental mechanics, these characters were just not likable. While there were moments where you can obviously show empathy for these characters based on things that happened to them, the characters themselves do not really warrant empathy in my mind. Fly was from a tough background, but he was a pothead, a pornhead, and an airhead. Stela went through a lot, but she set herself up for a lot of her issues and made plenty of boneheaded decisions. We are never able to really get a sense of these characters and a lot of opportunities for intensity are missed, leaving the story feeling incomplete. On one occasion, it works, but not in a way in which there is redemption to this book.

The readability of this book comes off like an amateur songwriter that is looking to be the next Bob Dylan, not the next solid songwriter, but the next Bob Dylan, in the copycat, execution kind of way. I like originality and books that are experimental. I did not like this book, because it ultimately does not know what it wants to be. All I know is that it is a poor book. I feel bad for all of the writers that have had their works rejected by literary magazines or anthologies, so that another story from this book could be published instead, especially those that continue to wait for their stories to be published.

[Karen_RunwrightReads · Rating 4 out of 5]

Note: Riverhead Books provided me with an Advance Uncorrected Proof. My review is based on reading that ARC

Told with an expansive storytelling format, Yanique fictionalizes how the history of the past 30 years has produced two characters that end up in present day NYC looking for love and finding each other. Monster unfolds against a backdrop of events ranging from the Challenger disaster to the current COVID pandemic.

We first meet Fly's father and his first girlfriend and the mixed reaction that an interracial couple receives as they traverse the US escaping real or perceived religious persecution. Cut to Fly's mother and the version of her childhood that she tells to justify her choices. Then we have Fly's coming of age story as he is raised by two parents for whom reality is a sliding scale to be manipulated at will. Finally we go to the Caribbean to meet the girl who will grow up to raise Stela, along with the boy who she tags as her savior even while he needs rescuing himself. This second half of the book was more interesting for me because it compares the experiences that travelers have in other countries and it gives the story even more range.

Do I recommend this book? Yes.
Monster In The Middle is captivating and the thematic discourse is intriguing even when the details may take away some of that focus.
Read this book if you like stories about generational issues and how the village impacts the child and his future relationships. As this is not solely the love story between Fly and Stela, it goes into some detail about their earlier attempts at love so if you're a purist about one-love-for-all-time kind of stories, this one won't be for you as almost all the characters that we meet have multiple significant relationships.

[Amanda Pierson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I tried this book because I love books that follow different generations, timelines, and how they all connect. I did not enjoy the hyper-sexualization in the book as well as COVID being a major part of the plot in the last 10% of the book.

[Isabelle Leventhal · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really loved everything about this book except for Stela and Fly's relationship. The book built up all of these relationships so well but when I got to theirs I felt like i never fully understood why they were together.

I did love it though and would highly recommend it.

[caitlin tiddy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nooooooo this book has such a a creative concept, but the way it was executed was just not creative at all. Had the backgrounds of the characters and their parents been interwoven into a plot that followed Fly and Stela’s life together then maybe it would have been more engaging.

[Imajin Consulting · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely loved this book! The concept of traveling through different generations and locations combined with all the emotions, challenges - an overall exploration of life, love & culture. Beautifully expressed through language and descriptions that brought it to life both visually and emotionally. I can go on & on. I may actually read it again and I'm not a huge fan of re-reading books - it's that good! I'm definitely adding Land of Love and Drowning to my TBR as I officially love Tiphanie Yanique's work. I was also lucky enough to join a discussion with her,hosted by the 'Caribbean Book Club' facebook group, which made me love her work even more:)

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a lot here to love: the multiple points of view are handled well, the writing can be quite gorgeous at time, and I thought the wide range of locations were all rendered believably. I also like the overarching point being made, that each new relationship brings with it the effects (positive and negative) of previous relationships.

So Stela and Fly each have a past, and those pasts are really quite moving and engaging, and I was impressed by how Yanigue got so much information across so quickly without it feeling like too much summary. And when they finally meet, our young couple, I found those initial encounters quite moving, because of everything that had come before.

And then the book ends with a trip to the police station about a stolen cell phone, and I really did not understand why it happened, or why we should care. Most of all, I found the reactions of these two main characters I thought I knew did not line up with what I had learned about them (especially his, I'll add, without going into more detail to avoid spoilers). If that final section had covered some other event, or just ended with the section before, my final impression would have been much stronger.

[Lindsey Z · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 🌟

[James B · Rating 5 out of 5]

So wildly entertaining. A young couple, Fly and Stela, start dating in NYC, but the book tells the story of their parents, their childhoods and the very long road of how these two found each other. Memorable characters throughout.

[Rol-J Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

As much as I wanted to give this novel a higher rating, I can't help but remember the many discursions, areas of confusion, and seeming unconnectedness of the chapters. I however appreciated that the author covered several important themes such as racism, sexuality and sensuality, and parenthood. I also appreciated that parts of the novel took place in different but critical periods, for example the 1980s and 1990s, a generation after the enactment of the Civil Rights Act in the U.S., the period before the election of the first Black President of the U.S., and the pandemic of 2020 and eruption of Black Lives Matter protests in the U.S. The author, in many ways, retold stories that have already been written, but with a distinct Caribbean and African flavour, giving us insight into the role members of the African diaspora played and continue to play in shaping the history, present and future of American milieux. I can't fault Yanique for wanting to tell this story at the time she told it as there were areas of the novel that I genuinely enjoyed, and it is clear that she made the effort to guarantee nuances throughout the novel. However, overall, I am not sure if it is a novel I will be speaking about a year from now. Perhaps an additional, slower read would do it justice.

[Ruth Gibian · Rating 4 out of 5]

When we fall in love, we are not just falling in love with the person present before us; we are falling in love with everyone who has come before them who has made them who they are. This is the thread that binds together the stories that are the novel, Monster in the Middle. Tiphanie Yanique packs a lot of stories into this relatively short book, and each is compelling in a different way, though they also rhyme and overlap with each other in ways that call back that initial premise. Through these stories of hardship, mental illness, abandonment, and survival, Yanique also traces many ways to be Black in America - born or with ancestors from the Caribbean, adopted by White parents, living in the South, in the North, in California. The stories, often quite melancholy, explore what love might be, what it might not be, and hopefully, what it finally is. Stela and Fly are ostensibly the lovebirds in this novel but there are many loves that precede theirs, and that precede them. Luscious writing.

[Kara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mmm, love stories. Some turn out good, some not so good. The focus is typically on the couple (because love story, duh), which is where Monster in the Middle diverges from the typical architecture of a love story. Yanique takes us through decades in order to really explore the why behind Stela and Fly's love story. This gives the reader a completely different and nuanced understanding of the inherited trauma (and baggage and habits and longings, etc.) each of the main characters brought to the table. This would be an excellent focus for a book club because Yanique really packed a lot into these pages.

I think it ended around a 3.5 for me. While I enjoyed each section individually, I found that I lost some steam when time/viewpoints jumped. It wraps up in an incredibly subtle way, leaving you halfway between wanting more and having plenty to contemplate on, both past and future.

thx to Goodreads for suppling this in a giveaway! love u besties

[Maggie Stohler · Rating 2 out of 5]

This took me a bit to get into, picked up in the middle, but left me kind of unsatisfied with the ending. I liked the structure of telling the story across generations but felt like something was missing.

[Diana N. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really like the overall concept of this book. We all have our own backstory and stories of our families.

This book is broken down into parts showing the stories of each Fly and Stella coming of age and the stories of their parents. Finally at the end the story of Fly and Stella together.

I really struggled with Fly's portion of the story since it seemed so preachy. I enjoyed Stella's story more, but wanted more depth from her character. I was hoping that the final section with Fly and Stella together was much longer since it seemed so short and rushed.

Overall I enjoyed certain parts of the book and the overall concept, but struggled through other parts.

I received a copy of this book through a goodreads giveaway.

[Jonathan (Jon) · Rating 1 out of 5]

⭐️

𝙁𝙧𝙤𝙢 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙖𝙬𝙖𝙧𝙙-𝙬𝙞𝙣𝙣𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙖𝙪𝙩𝙝𝙤𝙧 𝙤𝙛 𝙇𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙛 𝙇𝙤𝙫𝙚 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝘿𝙧𝙤𝙬𝙣𝙞𝙣𝙜, 𝙖𝙣 𝙚𝙡𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙧𝙞𝙘 𝙣𝙚𝙬 𝙣𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙡 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙢𝙖𝙥𝙨 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙚𝙢𝙤𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙞𝙣𝙝𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙖𝙣𝙘𝙚 𝙤𝙛 𝙤𝙣𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙪𝙥𝙡𝙚 𝙣𝙚𝙬𝙡𝙮 𝙞𝙣 𝙡𝙤𝙫𝙚.

👎 Unfortunately this book was not for me… I struggled so much with the story and characters. There were quite a bit of characters and I couldn’t connect with any of them. Clearly I’m just not the intended reader…

👎 I had such high hopes for this story. It takes place in NYC which I love in a book. Unfortunately it didn’t live up to my expectations whatsoever. There was this part - don’t want to spoil - that made me question the whole story.

👎 I never give one stars - I feel bad doing so - however I honestly can’t give this book anything else. I really did want to love it but it just wasn’t for me.

[Kara Kelliher · Rating 1 out of 5]

the inside flap of this book is really deceiving. i was expecting a romance but i barely got any love story until the end and it was disappointing to say the least. the woman are portrayed as dumb and the males are strictly focused on sex. there is religion mixed in along with back stories of honestly irrelevant characters. it was overall confusing and painful to get through. i don’t even really know what to say about this book. onto my cheesy romcoms to bring me some joy & peace

[Elise · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really love the premise of this book. In fact, I love it so much that I gave this one 75 pages instead of my usual 50, but I couldn’t get into it because it was too chaotic. Maybe it is too ambitious, so complicated that it failed to enchant, but I may try again.

[Jennie Canzoneri · Rating 3 out of 5]

(hardcover)

The first 1/3 or so was a bit of a slog, but it shifted into a far more interesting narrative (for me) when the chapters moved to Stela's family. The chapter when Stela was in Africa was really powerful (including her return to break up with Johann). While I liked the final chapter (with threads of the pandemic and BLM), it did sort of feel out of place against the rest of the book. Maybe I wanted more of it?

Also kind of a lot of strange sex stuff. (I really don't know if I'll ever recover from Fly watching that tape.)

I read this as part of a book club, and it did make for a good discussion though. Recommend for others to read as a group.

[Reading with Tara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interracial love story that goes back in time and tells the stories of the families that came before the two main characters; Fly & Stela. This was such an interesting read, as you learn how the lives of their parents, and the parents before them, and so on, have shaped the two main characters into who they are today.

This book was very raw at times, funny, charming, and overall engaging.

[Latasha Abney · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wasn’t a fan of Land of Love and Drowning, but wanted to give this one a try.

Two stars because the story of those introduced would’ve been interesting. I wanted more of their stories as individuals.

The finally story…why? Why was COVID involved? Why was this their ending? I understand what they (and their families dealt with in the past) but this felt forced. It seemed like there was a huge struggle with how the story would end, then the pandemic came along.

Never again.

[Leslie · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a 4 til I got to the end. I did not get fly and stela together, at all. He honestly seems like a loser and a hotep. Just smokes and watches porn. Didn’t really see what he added to stelas life. He was just there.

Prior to that final section, I mostly enjoyed the book, especially reading about Stela’s parents. They were less fleshed out than Flys but there was love, and that was nice to read.

Anyway, glad I’m finally done w this ish. Stela deserved better.

[Lawren M. Perry · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got this book as a goodread giveaway and just got a chance to read it. I enjoyed the book and how it was written. I really like following the story and the different viewpoints from each character. The story did get confusing at times but ultimately, it is a good read. 

[kendra eliza · Rating 3 out of 5]

i hate dnfing books. but when i can’t read a page without wanting to put down the book, i just have to. i read summaries and it seems like a really interesting story with intriguing characters. i just could not get into it.

[Imani · Rating 2 out of 5]

this is not a mf romance, dont piss me off

[NoraDawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was well written, touched my heart, gave me insight into cultures outside of my own, and addressed social justice issues. It'll stick with me.