I’d like to thank Fae Crate, Penguin, and Netgalley for providing me with my copy of Candice Iloh’s soon to be released Every Body Looking! Isn’t the cover gorgeous? I’m a sucker for a pretty cover and my eyes were drawn to that beautiful brown skin against that astounding backdrop of color.

Ah!

Now let’s get into it. For the most part, I enjoyed this! The novel, told in verse, gives us brief glimpses into the mind and circumstances of Ada, an 18 year old first generation Nigerian-American woman desperate for the freedom her new life as an HBCU student will bring. For a long time she has wilted under the expectations of her family: from her father’s conservative Christian values pressed upon her day by day, to her tumultuous relationship with her birth mother, to cruel school children and what they view as ‘other’, to extended family members who assert their right and ownership of who she is and what desires are acceptable to their household. Ada has had a rough time of it. Even her true passion, dance is frowned upon and hidden. She needs a change. College will bring that. Out from under those prying eyes, she is thrust into this new world where she’s the one in charge.

It’s different.

It’s exhilarating.

It’s terrifying.

Now Ada has the opportunity to truly start to look into who she really is, taking small steps towards understanding her sexuality, coming to grips with her traumas, building and standing by her self worth, and so much more. But friends, this is not a gentle tale. Iloh doesn’t pull punches. This journey of exploration is given to us through incredibly harsh passages. Many of these moments in time are devastating to read through, and the language and perspective we the readers are placed in has the potential to hit hard. But it isn’t all pain. Ada reminds us that while moving forward is often difficult, it is still possible. And wow, when Ada shines, she shines BRIGHT. This is a novel of beginnings.

I had a few issues, but my overall experience was positive. The formatting of my eARC was unfortunately a bit difficult to go through, as it chopped up many of the poems and I’d have to scroll back and forth, losing my place and rhythm. I also wished for a bit more of Ada’s story. Like I mentioned earlier, we get glimpses but a few times I felt that it wasn’t quite enough. I would’ve appreciated a solid passage here or there where we could go into detail. Some incredibly hard hitting issues are brought up that I would have loved to see further explored. While it was a pleasure to see Ada grow, the way the story was told had the end feeling a little incomplete. Perhaps it’s because I love closure.

Regardless, this is a story that will resonate with a lot of readers. Look forward to seeing it on shelves on September 22, 2020, friends! Thanks for a beautiful story!

Links:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3478131641

https://deannawritesthings.wordpress.com/2020/08/12/deanna-reads-arcs-every-body-looking/

Thank you for an advance copy of this book. Although I did not fully engage and connect with this first work, I enjoyed Candice Iloh's prose and I look forward to reading her future works. She shows promise as a developing literary talent, although this book is perhaps not as polished as it could have been.

Through poetic verse and flashbacks from second grade through college, readers learn about Ada’s difficult relationship with her volatile, drug addict mother and Bible thumping Nigerian father. She’s had to shuttle between their homes for years, feeling free at her mother’s because of the lack of rules, while being stifled at her father’s. In his world, men give the orders and women obey.

Dancing motivates and excites Ada, but she can never reveal this to her strict father. She also can’t tell him she feels more comfortable with girls than boys. Her father believes that if she prays more she will become what he expects her to be, while her mother’s temper tantrums and demanding ways are exhausting. Now that she has experienced the freedom of college Ada has outgrown their expectations. If she wants to truly be free, she will have to turn her back to her parent’s demands and forge her own road.

I had a hard time following the storyline because it constantly jumped between past and present and because the verses were laid out in an almost haphazard way. It was almost as if the recent success of books in poetic verse made the author randomly place words on the page to make it “poetic.” I don’t know if they appeared this way because the book was an ARC, or if that’s how they’ll be in the final version. Either way I had to read several times to figure out what just happened. I also didn’t like the open ending. It felt as if the author was preparing us for a sequel, or didn’t know how to completely tie the knot to end the book.

However it did have some good spots, showcasing a teen girl struggling to figure out her life, so I will recommend it for ages 16 and older.

I received a digital advance reading copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Refreshing and deep. Lovely writing. Excellent characterization. Excellent pick for teen readers. Younger teens may need a content warning re:sexual assault scene.

This book was hard to read due to formatting. In some sections, you had paragraphs and in others, you had poetry driven lines. I wish that the author would have gone deeper into the connection between Kendra and the main character. The back and forth between the past and present also prevented a problem due to formatting. I think once corrected, it has the potential to be a good read.

This has a lot of promise, but I'm opting to put it down for now @ 30%
The writing/verse isn't doing it for me right now; I may pick it up again in the future when I'm feeling up for a story in verse! I was having a hard time investing into the story and not hooked on the writing.

Ada is going to be with me for a very long time. Here is a girl who is a good student, an obedient daughter, a quiet observer of others...who is also failing her accounting class, who wants to change her major in college, who dances with such passion that you can't look away. Just like the title, Every Body Looking, that can be read in two ways, you can "read" Ada two ways as well as she grows into the strong person she needs to be. Gorgeous, gorgeous writing. I read every page three times to make sure I didn't miss anything.

Ada is a college freshman at a Historically Black College who struggles with her identity as a result of many years of trauma as a child. She is far from home and begins to explore what it's like to make decisions for herself while also fighting against what her Nigerian father expects of her, how her mother's addiction affected her and other adversities she's faced such as with her sexuality and her dreams to dance. Through verse, Candice Iloh illustrates to readers that now is the time for Ada to be brave and decide what her future is going to look like—while everybody is looking.

As a soon-to-be college freshman myself, I can very much relate to Ada's identity struggles. It's hard to balance what your parents want and expect for you and what you want for yourself at times—all while battling your own inner-demons. Iloh was adept at describing how complicated relationships with parents can be as well as the relationship we have with ourselves. She didn't try to glorify anything. These relationships are complicated, as our parents are not perfect and they can mess us up sometimes. It's apart of life, and Ada is trying to understand how to cope with her parents and a life independent of them in the aftermath of her childhood. Aren't we all?

While Iloh's verse is beautifully written, I felt as though the poetic structure was confusing at times. This may be due to the eARC formatting but the lack of grammar and line breaks left me rereading sentences over again, trying to figure out what exactly Iloh was trying to say. The eARC formatting may also have made it difficult to tell, but I felt as though the whole book just continued on and on with very few "chapters." I couldn't determine if there were titles to the poems and if they should have been separated to create more of a sense of time passing. I also felt as though there wasn't a particular flow to the novel at times. Which I understand, because as we were following Ada through her journey in her first year of college, some of the traumatic events we would jump back to (because they related to what was happening in the present) did not happen in a chronological fashion. Lastly, I was disappointed with the lack of resolution in this novel. I felt as though there was this climax, a tipping point, where Ada then makes a decision on what she's going to do and we don't see any outcomes of this at the end. As readers, we're left wondering why there was so much built up, it's as though there's a crash, and we're staring at the fog of all the rubble waiting for it to clear but it doesn't.

Candice Iloh's verse novel is a great read for lovers of poetry and fiction. It's a quick read that examines issues all teenagers and adults alike struggle with. Thanks to Penguin and Netgalley for the free eARC of this novel.

Thank you so much Penguin and Fae Crate for this!!

I really enjoy books written in verse and when I heard this book was exactly that I was so excited. This is told through the eyes of Ada, a first generation Nigerian American girl who is just graduating from High School. We learn through her that the expectations of her family, namely her father are set very high and she carries that with her into her first year at an Historically Black College.

We see a great deal of Ada's family life and her relationships in college. Ada has a very strong voice and her various struggles with home and school are very relatable.

What I struggled with is the pacing, it felt very off kilter in some ares which pulled me from the flow of the story. That could have been because of the formatting of the eARC as well. The ending felt very abrupt, I was expecting two or three more verses when the book just ends.

On a whole, I really enjoyed the experience of reading this. Candice Iloh is someone that I will totally look for more books by.

I'm always looking for new verse novels and this one was good.

Things I liked: Ada's journey was very relatable for high school students. The occasional word definitions - reminiscent of David Levithan's Lover's Dictionary.

Things I didn't like: so much happened and not all was resolved (though, you know, that's real life)

*copy from Netgalley*

In general, I do not like books written in verse as it forces an author to force a story to adhere to a format that might benefit from a more traditional writing structure and that's what I feel about Every Body Looking. There was so many good themes and plot lines in Every Body Looking that I wish could have been expanded upon. Instead of written in verse, I could imagine this book might have worked better if it were written as a diary. However, I was able to read the book in less than four hours and I was able to feel the struggle of the main character, Ada, in my heart. Candice Iloh did a great job of describing the difficulty of living on your own and discovering one's self during the first year of college in such a realistic way. It was especially great that it took place in a HBCU (Historically Black College and University) setting. I would like to see more diverse Black stories like this in the Young Adult genre. I would love to see another book written by Candice Iloh in this world/campus.

A novel in verse that is semi-autobiographical about a first generation Nigerian immigrant, Ada, finding what she loves independent of her family's/society's expectations of her. Body is separate in the title because Iloh writes with so much thoughtfulness and imagery about Black female bodies and bodily autonomy and who is allowed to/stripped of that autonomy and why. Ada has a fractured relationship with her mostly absent and abusive mother, and though she loves her very religious Nigerian father, she struggles with his expectations for her future that don't match her own desires for herself. So much is good here, but the story jumps around in time, which was sometimes confusing, and not all of the flashbacks served the story, as some led to unfinished narrative threads. The book also stops abruptly, which was a bit jarring. I want to see her verse on the page, because the e-galley had editor notes and I'm hoping some of the time-hopping confusion will be mitigated with a word flow edit on the pages of the book. I can already think of students that I will recommend this to, and will definitely add it into my book-talk rotation.

I first heard of this book after watching Nic Stone's Debut Who Instagram live series. The story follows two main timelines of sixth grade and college which I've never seen done in a young adult before. I really liked how the book showed how relationships influencing identity based on what you've been taught and conditioned in your younger years. I could relate to learning so much more about myself in college when I was around people different from me showing me myself in contrast. I liked the juxtaposition between middle school years and college, and hope more young adult book explore this transition from kid to independent young adult. The writing in this book is also gorgeous. Each page reads like its own poem and the story as a poetry collection telling a cohesive story. The multiple forms are make the book richer and deeper.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Every Body Looking is a harsh, honest and emotional debut from Candice Iloh. Outlining college year one, the first chance of independence, for Ada - finding her identity and embracing her love of dance.

It took me a little while to get used to the layout and pacing of this book, but once I adjusted I did enjoy the almost diary-style of the book.

Reading this It felt like it needed a little bit of a polish and perhaps some fleshing out of the abrupt-feeling end, but overall this is a strong and interesting debut.

Nigerian-American Ada has just graduated from high school in Chicago. Through stark free verse, she shares her transition to an HBCU in Washington, DC. Flashbacks to events in 1st, 2nd, and 6th grades give readers a better understanding of the things Ada has carried from her childhood. Addressing family expectations, friendship, and sexuality, Iloh packs a punch in her YA debut.

The electronic arc (thanks Dutton and aNetGalley!) is unformatted, so I don’t know what the final layout will look like, but given the fact that the arc is about 100 full pages and the finished book will be about 400, we can expect plenty of white space that underscores the spareness of Ada’s voice.

This is a novel in verse about our protagonist, Ada, graduating from high school, where she never fit in, and finding her place in the world as she enters college and lives away from her family for the first time. The flashbacks help provide context for experiences Ada has in the present moment.

Ada's voice kept me reading -- I read the entire book in one afternoon! I did not want the book to end and was surprised when there were no more pages to read. I would have liked a little more at the end, as it seemed a bit abrupt, but overall, I really enjoyed Every Body Looking.

I have added this book to my classroom library wishlist and will definitely recommend this book to my students, especially those who enjoyed novels like The Poet X.

Gorgeous. I will definitely be getting a print copy of this book and sharing it widely. A great book about that first year of college and finding yourself. Absolutely beautiful.