dnf at 47%

i tried but i just didnt like this book. im not exactly creating any new sentiments here but let me just say the advertisement that this book showcases "black boy joy" and is "trauma free" is a little insane to me. the title of the book is literally a reference to lynching! we are reminded from the jump that malik is a deeply traumatized child who witnessing the supposed death of his mother. it is actually trauma filled from cover to cover and to say otherwise is hilarious.

another thing is the usage of aave in this book at many points seems to be a way to extend the word count rather than add something to the passage. this is an issue to the point it took me out of the reading experience. the conjugation of aave in this story is also off and it reads unnatural at many points, even if someone actually talks like this it is most likely not going to translate to a page the same way and that is evident here. i genuinely couldn't deal with the way words were dragged out in this and started doing annotations to correct it and ive never felt the need to do that before.

i think if we were to strip back and look at the bare bones of this, there is a promising story buried in here. however from what i read, this book needed way more workshopping and the hype truly wasnt worth it.