However, there's an issue plaguing YA's publishing - the lack of young adult and teen voices within non-stereotypical stories. But, you know what? I enjoy stories - period - and many of them come from YA. I'm someone's parent and should have left the subgenre behind. I think they would have worked as full-length novels instead. Of course, being a collection of short stories, there were still several stories that felt rushed or not fleshed out all the way. You want a gay cowboy romance? A somber piece following the death of a loved one? An almost-time-traveling story? There's all that and more. I enjoyed that each story had the common thread of exploring the main character's relationship with their race, but the execution was totally different. The book aims to explore, as Ibi Zoboi puts it in her introduction, "What are the cultural threads that connect Black people all over the world to Africa? How have we tried to maintain certain traditions as part of our identity? And as teenagers, do we even care? These are the questions I had in mind when inviting sixteen other Black authors to write about teens examining, rebelling against, embracing, or simply existing within their own idea of Blackness." I don't usually pick up anthologies, but I'm so happy I did!
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