This book had potential to be great but didn’t quite make it in the end. 

There are many things I liked about this book. The concept of telling a BLM story with scifi elements is fantastic! I loved the focus on protest and community. The story was told with a high pace and was filled with action. The words flowed easily and I was easily inside the story. Telling these kind of stories is so important and this one definitely got its message across in a powerful way. 

However, by about the halfway point I started to notice some issues. The first one I noticed was that I was really missing the establishment of the relationships between characters. I was missing character interactions and conversations. A lot of this comes down to a lack of show instead of tell. The book was telling me Jamal cared about Marco but it didn’t really show me. Until the end I didn’t have a clear picture of their dynamic. This was even worse with Cathrine. 

The voice of this story, told from Jamal’s perspective, had some clunky moments. He was telling me a bunch of things I’d much rather see the story tell me instead of him spelling it out to me. For example, he kept saying stuff like “I’m a journalist so I’m…”. He was really pushing on the point that he’s a journalist and he has certain characteristics because of that. I’d much rather see and find these characteristics myself!

There were also some moments where the dialogue was very clunky and not realistic at all. Sometimes it was really odd and sounded like an amateur writer wrote it. 

Lastly, the scifi aspect of the story came short for me. This is probably more of a taste issue. But I really hoped that the story would lean more into its scifi elements and the possibilities this creates. 

I listed a lot of issues I had but it’s definitely not like I didn’t enjoy this book. I definitely did and I’m glad I picked it up! Especially the first half really got me. 
Overall, I’d say this is a powerful book with great potential that didn’t quite get there sometimes.