Scan barcode
A review by bookbybook
I'm Not Dying with You Tonight by Kimberly Jones, Gilly Segal
4.0
I received this nook in exchange for an honest review. This in no way changes my opinion, and all the words below are my own.
When this book was pitched to me for review it was compared to The Hate U Give and Dear Martin. Now, those are two of my favourite books so I had some high expectations going in. This book definitely met a lot of those expectations. You can really tell it's well done because I do not like multiple first-person perspective books, at all, and yet I loved this one.
It's a little hard to encapsulate the biggest part of my love for this book without spoilers. Obviously, the biggest plot point is that the rioting is racially fueled, and only one of the main characters is African-American while the other is white and neither know anything about the other. I love love love the perspective of Campbell, the white main character, learning about issues that do not affect her and seeing how privileged she really is because of her skin tone. This is a story that is not given a perspective often in YA books that focus around black lives, for some pretty obvious reasons. So it's super cool to see that back and forth between the two different views of racial issues and inequalities. It's unfortunate but sometimes people need to witness things first hand to understand them and that happened for both characters in a very real way throughout.
The things that made me drop it from the 5-star position of the other books to 4 stars are all just small personal preferences really. Such as how annoying one of the character's romantic relationship was for the ENTIRE book. The biggest thing was just how desperately I wish this book came with a map. Almost the entire story is spent following the two main characters while they are moving around during the riot, and I just really did not feel like I had a good enough understanding of where the heck they were in reference to the places they had been and that they were going to. It made it more difficult to understand how far they were really walking, and how far the rioting had spread.
The entire book happens all during said "tonight", so while I would have loved some more development of the all those locations, and even the characters, it was really well done for the time span. I have not read many books that take place in less than a week even because it's so hard to develop a proper storyline that is that short, and these authors nailed it (I would have happily taken an epilogue though). The book was a quick read, and even though there was not really enough time to get attached to the individual characters it was written in such an intense, and real way that it felt like anyone could be in the positions of the main characters and you would still feel for thems so strongly.
When this book was pitched to me for review it was compared to The Hate U Give and Dear Martin. Now, those are two of my favourite books so I had some high expectations going in. This book definitely met a lot of those expectations. You can really tell it's well done because I do not like multiple first-person perspective books, at all, and yet I loved this one.
It's a little hard to encapsulate the biggest part of my love for this book without spoilers. Obviously, the biggest plot point is that the rioting is racially fueled, and only one of the main characters is African-American while the other is white and neither know anything about the other. I love love love the perspective of Campbell, the white main character, learning about issues that do not affect her and seeing how privileged she really is because of her skin tone. This is a story that is not given a perspective often in YA books that focus around black lives, for some pretty obvious reasons. So it's super cool to see that back and forth between the two different views of racial issues and inequalities. It's unfortunate but sometimes people need to witness things first hand to understand them and that happened for both characters in a very real way throughout.
The things that made me drop it from the 5-star position of the other books to 4 stars are all just small personal preferences really. Such as how annoying one of the character's romantic relationship was for the ENTIRE book. The biggest thing was just how desperately I wish this book came with a map. Almost the entire story is spent following the two main characters while they are moving around during the riot, and I just really did not feel like I had a good enough understanding of where the heck they were in reference to the places they had been and that they were going to. It made it more difficult to understand how far they were really walking, and how far the rioting had spread.
The entire book happens all during said "tonight", so while I would have loved some more development of the all those locations, and even the characters, it was really well done for the time span. I have not read many books that take place in less than a week even because it's so hard to develop a proper storyline that is that short, and these authors nailed it (I would have happily taken an epilogue though). The book was a quick read, and even though there was not really enough time to get attached to the individual characters it was written in such an intense, and real way that it felt like anyone could be in the positions of the main characters and you would still feel for thems so strongly.