Thanks to the publisher for an ARC! 

This book was a bit odd. It’s a very interesting premise but I did spend much of the book trying to figure out whether this was actually a fantasy world, futuristic, or a dream-state and I’m not totally convinced that all the loose ends were neatly tied up to make this world fully understandable.

Still it’s quite fun and I love the obsession with learning new words (and the dictionary in the back!), and all the animal friends Beatrice makes in the forest. And I think it’d be a great read for Black and mixed-race kids as a lot of the MC’s focus is how proud she is of what she looks like and where she comes from.

That said, it was a lot more violent that I expected for a middle grade novel. There’s overt racism, support of segregation, and gun violence. I would’ve loved if it had been a joyful book about embracing Black beauty without setting that up in opposition to such violent rhetoric. I’m not all the familiar with middle grade to comment on how violence is typically handled in the genre, or how much of it is presented, but it felt very extreme to me.