A review by miss_majuu
Watch Us Rise by Ellen Hagan, Renée Watson

2.0

This book is very important and powerful. It presents and discusses a very distinct view of the world, while also pointing out where sexism is internalized in every day life. I would recommend this book to everyone that is interested by the premise and okay with very much of "everywhere is racism/sexism/etc in our everyday life".
Because of these very strongly presented opinions and because I don't agree or like all of them, I'll give this book the middle of the road rating of 2.5🌟. Rounding down because I do dislike more than I like

[long, detailed description to come. that at the top is a good summary of my thoughts if you don't wanna read all of it]


~the good~
-The poems and blog entries or essays. So many powerful, thought provoking quotes and poems that were more creative than anything I have ever done.
-Jasmine and her family dynamic/plot line(!!) This dealt so wonderfully with this heavy topic. I cried and just wanted to hug my parents.
-how incredibly feminist it was. I kinda loved how straightforward/ in-your-face the message was.
-that the main characters got called out when they were doing something negative. Even though both of them were very (very) inclusive they weren't perfect and forgot about things, which sometimes got challenged.


~the bad~
-the love stories. It's almost never for me and again this time I didn't care about the relationships. They got too much focus when I was more interested in literally anything else. Also one of the love interest extremely didn't fit into the world view of our protagonist, which is why I didn't get how this plot line continued for so long.
-Chelsea's character. Even though I liked how "in-your-face" it was, I just got annoyed how she called out everyone in every situation, no matter if it was appropriate or not. She just isn't a character I can connect to because I'm personally very different. Also she made a lot of mistakes as well (her love interest is just one of them) so she really wasn't in a position to be mad at other people.
-for a book that tried to be so incredibly inclusive/diverse and had both main characters have this as a major character trait, queerness and disability was never discussed. and you can't have it both ways
-lastly I didn't like how I got the impression that this tried to paint one specific type of feminism (could be a misunderstanding by my part but it's the overall tone I saw). There's a lot of discussion about how "the princess trope" is bad and it paints a bad picture for girls, which is why you shouldn't have it at all. In addition to that the moms got asked why the stay at home and the answer isn't accepted. They're only doing this because some kind of internalized sexism.
And that's just not the type of feminism I stand by. I'm of the opinion that feminism is about empowering all woman and their choices, even if it is being a stereotypical housewife.