A review by booktribe
Ghost Roast by Shawnelle Gibbs, Shawneé Gibbs

2.0

If I can figure out a way to articulate my thoughts about this book well I’ll write a real review, but for now, just know that this book did not sit right with my Black ass spirit.

In this graphic novel we have the ghost of an enslaved woman willingly spending her afterlife as a servant to a white woman. (And we never check up on her at the end to see if she was freed from the house or still choosing to serve this old white lady.)

You have a main character who is falling in love with the ghost of a descendant of slave owners. We later find out that there’s more to his story, but still, she didn’t know that and was still pining over him. This same main character tries to save a racist ghost from being eradicated and uses “violence is never the answer” to justify not killing said RACIST ghost.

The main character’s friends in the beginning of the book are shown to be bad people who say lil micro aggressions and are just overall mean, and there’s no character growth from them, but the main character is still friends with them at the end. Their behavior was literally never addressed. Everything was just fine. So, why give them a bad personality in the beginning for it to never be brought up again?


I just have a lot of problems with this. The artwork is pretty though. I wouldn’t suggest Black young adults read this. This does not give the right message of how racists should be dealt with…