A new to me author, Aya deLeon, has written a delightful story of a tightly wound, young, African American woman, Yolanda Vance. She has worked her entire life to be the best she can be when suddenly, as a brand new attorney at a prestigious New York law firm, she is embroiled in the middle of a raid by the FBI. Yolanda quickly turns whistleblower and ends up working for the FBI. She only wants to be an attorney, but she has to learn all things FBI, including how to shoot a gun. She soon is sent on an undercover mission in California to infiltrate an African American extreme eco-activist group, “Red, Black and Green which recruits young teens. Yolanda soon discovers that things aren’t as they seem, drops her defenses, and becomes attached to her teen subjects and the “RBG” group.

She begins to question the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. To make matters worse, she has formed a strong attraction to a local professor, also a member of the “RBG” Group, and cannot confide in him of her deception. Forces conspire to silence Yolanda, and she must decide to fight for what she knows in her heart is right. Will good overcome evil? The conclusion is explosive.

I loved this book! I thank NetGalley and the publisher, Kensington Books, for the opportunity to read and review this book. #netgalley #ASpyintheStruggle

3.5✨

“Because it was never about helping our communities with our real problems. It was a white savior publicity stunt. And they always had their real allegiance to these fucking corporations and never to the people.”

Wow, just wow. The plot of this story was amazing. It was packed full of important social justice themes from, environmental racism to gentrification to immigration.

It was clear the author did their research about the environment, the FBI and the Bay Area of Cali. I really enjoyed the imagery used for the cities and spaces Yolanda moved through.

While I didn’t mind the romance, I really didn’t enjoy Yolanda’s partner. For me, he was to overbearing and just came off as pushy. His character seemed a little stalkerish and at one point had me questioning his motives.

Overall, the story was a little easy to figure out but I appreciated the emails and news stories that were included throughout the story. I think with a few minor cleanups this story would be amazing. Such as, more development of the secondary characters - mainly the youth involved in RBG! - and a better ending. I can’t wait to read more from this author.

Thank you to NetGalley and Kensington Books for this ARC, I really appreciate it. All opinions are my own.

Highly recommended for fans of suspense novels. Though this is a suspense novel, there is some romance thrown into the story.

I found myself rooting for the protagonist and I liked the ending.

If John Grisham or Michael Connelly was Black, they could have written a novel like A Spy in the Struggle.

I received a free digital copy of A Spy in the Struggle from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This was such an engaging and fun read I am so glad I requested it.

We follow a new FBI Agent, Yolanda as she goes undercover on her first mission. She's told they are an extremist group, radicalizing teenagers and causing problems for a company who came to a small town. The company is pushing a bunch of fantastic green measures, and providing jobs to the community.

As Yolanda dives deep into the case she discovers things may not be what she was led to believe and has to begin questioning everything she thought she knew and figure out where her loyalties truly lie.

To say I was hooked is an understatement. I flew through this in a matter of hours, and was genuinely upset when I had to set it down over the course of 3 days when real life got in my way. It was engaging, fast paced and addicting. There was real-world terror in it, it all felt like a story that could (is?) happen every day.

In this #ownvoices story of espionage, we won't find a glamorous James Bond shooting left and right with few consequences or regrets. It hits the ground running on page one, when Yolanda is a whistleblower at her corporate law firm and ends up working for the FBI as other job opportunities evaporate in the aftermath. She enjoys her white collar crime unit briefly before being sent undercover into a teen "extremist black identity" group that focuses on the environment and how it intersects with so many other important issues adversely affecting their community.

Yolanda arrives in California irritated but determined to prove her worth to the FBI and get back home. She views the teens as whiners and looks at her own life experience as an example of how black people can succeed in the current system. Her transformation throughout the book is exquisite. She juggles her two roles as undercover agent and mentor to some of the best-written teenagers I've seen. They're independent, thoughtful, and advocate for themselves and others. The author also provides us with non-chronological flashbacks to understand how Yolanda grew to be a woman in her particular predicament. They are poignant, insightful, and further rather than detract from the plot.

What else to gush about? There's a romantic subplot more adorable, respectful, and heartfelt than actual romance novels I've read. There are adrenaline-pumping action scenes.The story spotlights both how corporations' environmental impact hits black and Indigenous communities the hardest and also how the racist, corporation-loving attitudes of government organizations further harm these same communities. Every supporting character has a spark of life, even the villains and ghosts of Yolanda's past. LGBT characters are represented lovingly and vivaciously. The challenges and dangers affecting Latinx immigrants are thrown in sharp relief. Feminism is threaded throughout, and this book has the funniest discussion of Title IX I didn't know I needed.

This has been my best read of November so far and one of my top reads this year. It hits shelves next month on 12/29!

Thank you to Netgalley and Dafina for the opportunity to read and review this arc. I was really excited for A Spy in the Struggle, but unfortunately found it to be a little lackluster. I simply couldn't get invested in the story, and I think the pacing just felt off for me. However, I really loved the strong themes of social justice and intersectionality in this book.

I did not like the writing in this book. I felt like the author was trying to hard and it was difficult for me to get into. The thing I loved most was the cover.

Book Review for A Spy in the Struggle by Aya de Leon
Full review for this title can be found at: @fyebooks on Instagram!

*Potential spoilers included*

I enjoyed the first 2 thirds of this book, becoming invested in the story and characters and enjoyed the use of redacted emails to add tension and mystery. However, I got a little disillusioned once the relationship between Yolanda and Jimmy heated up. I felt that the love scenes were overworked and unnecessarily detailed, which jarred with the wider story.

I would have preferred for some of the sideline characters (Marcus, Sharon, Carlos, Nakeesha, etc.) to have been developed further and given more backstory, accentuating the main social justice theme throughout the book.

This was such a nice read. The romance is secondary to the themes of social justice but I knew that that's how Aya de León writes. Here the plot was more contained than in other books. The characters were interesting and the chemistry was fantastic once the book shifted toward the romance. I do wish that the main character was not quite so judgmental. It is part of her story arc but it was hard to hear her internalized self hatred and anti-Blackness.

Aya de León is great at using social issues with intersectional feminism to create complex characters. Yolanda gets hired as a lawyer for the FBI to go undercover and infiltrate a teen activist group. Initially nervous, she prepares herself to get the job done. Yolanda is faced with an ideological political and culture clash as she learns more about the teens and their social activism. Yolanda eventually has to determine if she will fight for the government or the community who seeks justice.

Yolanda is a whistleblower turned FBI agent sent to spy on the community she once lived among. I say that because she attended the fancy private school in an otherwise impoverished, blue-collar town. Because she lived a privileged life, she has trouble connecting with the youth that she was sent to spy on, and secretly looks down on them for complaining about their circumstances instead of doing what she did- working hard to overcome them. This perspective is typical of people that do not have any personal experience with poverty. Poor people can be classified as 'lazy' if you don't acknoledge the systemic forces that work to keep poor people poor. Yolanda is the exception, not the rule, and it's not fair for her to tokenize herself early in the book.

Overall, I thought it was slow in some parts and I found myself forcing myself to keep reading and get through it. I did like Yolanda's transformation and the action at the end. The cover was also very beautiful and striking.

This is my first Aya de Leon book and I have no regrets. Firstly the cover is so gorgeous 😍 and we have to appreciate this. This book is about a whistleblower who becomes an FBI Agent (yep plot twist) and who gets sent to her old neighborhood (oh oh ) because a group of black teenagers are causing trouble . You just have to read this book because it's so amazing and I recommend it ! Huge thanks to Kensington for such a wonderful book with a great character that is exceptionally developed and a plot that is so amazing . Recommend it for the great plot (not forgetting cover).

I'm not an American, I'm not black and I don't belong to any kind of minority where I live - but I've always had a heart for minorities. As far as I can tell, this novel by Aya de Léon gives great insight into a community I don't know much about.
The most interesting part of this novel was the character development, how insight will change your mind. The love story was a nice bonus, but the main focus was on Yolanda's inner struggle between her ambitions as a lawyer, now FBI agent undercover, and her new found friends.
With all this said, the main storyline about the FBI's meddling to support a criminal business corporation is a really suspenseful thriller.
All in all a gripping combination of social criticism, milieu study, love story and spy thriller.

Not sure where to begin...

Seems like this book was a mash up of all of our current news headlines and then we were rushed with how everything wrapped up.

I think more research in how the FBI and Law Enforcement operates on covert missions could have helped with the overall execution of the premise. The corporate cover up and immigrant situation wasn't fully explained YET seemed to be a big theme throughout.

More character development of the corrupt FBI officers may have added to the story as well.

This had a lot going on and seemed a bit rushed to wrap up its expansive storyline near the end of the book.

This wasn't my favorite entry in the Justice Hustlers series, but I love that these books even exist and want to see more like them getting published. It was a little a slow in places but I also liked all the focus on politics and community activism and unlike with some other romances I wasn't here for the actual romance as much anyway, so it worked for me.

This was a compelling read that I couldn't put down or just had to find out what happened next. Here, Yolanda Vance is a junior attorney in Manhattan for a big, fancy corporate law firm, which was under investigation for security fraud, according to the FBI. Instead of shredding papers as her boss asks, she keeps them and becomes a whistleblower for justice. We definitely stan a woman who's unwilling to throw away her hard-earned career because some man told her to go down with a sinking ship. She then joins the FBI as a backup plan because she needs a job after she's blackballed from corporate law for not shredding the papers. This book's tone is very clear and engaging which gives me all the information about the protagonist yet still makes me need to keep reading. I love Yolanda as a protagonist because she's strong as hell, like YASSS! Back to the story, she's sent on an undercover mission on the west coast with a black extremist activist group in California. The book also has a few other perspectives, including a mystery agent who was taken off this case and think Yolanda's not the right fit to take over, plus cop Rodriguez who finds a black woman dead after an OD. These two other viewpoints are a bit much and didn't add much to the overall story, you honestly could have just had Yolanda's side and the book would be just fine. But this SA sends redacted emails, which I just wanna know all the juicy deets. Outside of all that, Yolanda meets college professor Olujimi aka Jimmy, and the two start flirting, and soon enough, love blinds her to her job and purpose here. Yolanda is just so strong and fierce, which I love to see. It's so endearing and I just want to keep reading and find out all the action and drama. As she spends more time with the organization and Jimmy during the height of the BLM movement, she soon begins to question her values and career, her legality here and ethics, when she realizes she's on the wrong side of what she wants to be. Also, Jimmy. Let's talk about him for a bit. He's so sweeping and romantic, but I can't tell if it's a too good to be true thing or if he's completely innocent in all this, I would have loved more backstory and insight into him. Overall, this read was so compelling and full of emotions, that wow, I thoroughly enjoyed that.

Interesting plot about a whistleblower turned FBI agent, who's sent back to her old neighbourhood because a black militant group of teenagers has been causing some trouble with a big biotech corp ... but all might not be what it seems. Being a rookie agent, not only is she still figuring her job out, but she still has a lot of baggage and trauma from her past that bleeds into her life and relationships. The author does a great job of developing a complex character, and an interesting story line. The plot is relatively fast paced, but without sacrificing the story. The secondary characters were also intriguing - but some of their story's felt half-formed - like I wanted to know more about them. Also - I did get a bit of inst-love vibe, but 'imma forgive it this time because they were grown and hella curte. This is a quick and easy story to get into - read it!

This is a great example of how what seems to be genre fiction--in this case, a thriller--can also serve as social commentary and education. Yolanda, an FBI agent, goes undercover with a Black organization that is seeking justice for the damage done to its community by a local industrial giant. The more she involves herself with the group, the more aware she becomes of why we need Black Lives Matter and other groups working for change.