ARC, 403 pages
Release Date: September 22, 2020
Published by: Dutton Books for Young Readers
Read from: September 21-27, 2020
Ada, #1
Source: Publishers
TW: Addiction, Childhood Sexual Abuse
For fans of: Novels in Verse, Own Voices, Coming of Age, Contemporary, YAEvery Body Looking is a debut novel in verse in the style of Elizabeth Acevedo and Jason Reynolds. Candice Iloh’s book tells the story of Ada–daughter of an immigrant father and an African American mother–and her struggle to find a place for herself in America and in her own family.
Every Body Looking is a heavily autobiographical novel of a young woman’s struggle to carve a place for herself–for her black female body–in a world of deeply conflicting messages.
Told entirely in verse, Ada’s story encompasses her earliest memories as a child, including her abuse at the hands of a young cousin, her mother’s rejection and descent into addiction, and her father’s attempts to create a home for his American daughter more like the one he knew in Nigeria.
The present-tense of the book is Ada’s first year at Howard University in Washington D.C., where she must finally confront the fundamental conflict between who her family says she should be and what her body tells her she must be.
*MY THOUGHTS*
I’m not usually a novels in verse kinda girl, but this one had all this Black Girl Magic on the cover, and I knew I needed to have it. And sure enough, while reading it, I fell for it more and more!
This coming of age novel tells the story of Ada, a Nigerian girl who is trying her best to navigate through her mother’s addiction, her dad and his new girlfriend, and starting her life in a historically Black College. She runs into all types of things as she realizes some of these dreams are not hers at all.
The best thing about this was hands down the writing style. Not necessarily the way the poems were written, but more so what they actually said. Alot of these poems were hella deep, and not at all what I was expecting when I started this. It definitely had me in my feels at some points too. For instance, I don’t like books that cover addiction of any kind, but this book showed it without really showing it on the page. I recognized some of the signs from the things my own family member used to do, but it wasn’t enough to trigger me like other books have.
What I didn’t care for was the length and the plot. The whole thing was really slow. I know it’s because this is a coming of age novel and we had to look at her life and how she got back to this point and things like that, but it was really long. At some points I thought they could have left them out. It was for lack of a better term, really long winded, but it was definitely still good.
This book was not what I was expecting, but it was still good. The ending showed a brave character, completely changed from how she was in the beginning of the book. This coming of age novel is one that I can see being very popular as teens navigate their new life during their first year of college.
Overall, I give this
