This book was equal parts frustrating and impactful.
A story about a group of Black women who've been lifelong friends you see how each one is navigating their relationships and the wide spectrum of struggles that Black women face.

It was wonderful to read about flawed, strong, and thriving Black women, standing in their power, embracing self love, and demanding to be treated with the respect and support the deserve, while also seeing how the Black men in their lives are working to overcome the systems that do everything they can to keep them down and the ways in which that impacts the way they show their love to the people around them.

Reading about the joys and heartache of Black love and seeing these Black women lifting each other up even though their drastically different life choices made me really glad I picked up this one even though contemporary fiction is usually my preferred genre.

Eboni Flowers did a wonderful job with the narration, and by the end I felt like I really had a clear picture of these women were. I already their story will stay with me for quite awhile, and I'll definitely be interested in reading more from Tracy Brown.

***Thank you to Macmillan Audio for providing me with a copy of the audiobook for free via NetGalley for an unbiased review.

Even though I read the premise, I had this book all wrong. I was expecting thriller/suspense vibes, but this is solidly in the contemporary women’s fiction category. It’s a wonderfully executed story about four black women at different stages of their lives--Ivy, Coco, Deja, and Nikki. The friends’ lives overlap and intersect in many ways. Each woman is super successful in their chosen path, but feels some level of dissatisfaction or restlessness in their life. It leads each of them to make possibly life-altering decisions, and we see how the ramifications of those choices plays out.

This story took a really intense turn toward the end, and it made me get really emotional. I don’t want to spoil too much, but I’ll say it’s super relevant and extremely thought-provoking.

Ivy has recently decided to break up with her long-time boyfriend and father of her two teenage boys. Although Ivy promised to stick with Michael for the duration of his lengthy prison sentence--two decades in, she's lonely and looking to fill a void that’s been empty for too long.

Deja is a thriving real estate agent who shares a daughter with someone who also went to prison the same time Ivy’s boyfriend did. Deja chose to move forward without him and has been married to an NYPD police sergeant for more than a decade. When her child’s father returns to the picture, she finds herself at a crossroads.

Coco is successful, single, and content. She meets someone who could change her mind about living the single life--but the relationship definitely comes with challenges.

Nikki --Deja’s little sister-- is a social media influencer with a huge following, but the life isn’t as glamorous as it seems.

This book perfectly balances a conversational ease in its writing with poignant social commentary. It's a powerful story of friendship, motherhood, love, loss, and what it means to be a black woman in today’s world. I had a chance to listen to the audio from MacMillan audio via the NetGalley Shelf App, and narrator Eboni Flowers does a remarkable job giving each character a distinct voice without taking you out of the story. The audiobook runs just a bit more than 11 hours.

I received of this book form #Netgalley. This was another great book from Tracy Brown and i have been an avid reader of her books since White Lines. The story centers around successful and determined females all who have to face their and personal histories and the long term effects of the choices they made in their youth, that has determined how their lives have progressed. The novel also deals with police brutality, racism, and the criminalization of our black boys. Entertaining but also necessary in today's climate.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4360910713

Thank. you NetGalley, the author Tracy Brown and the publisher for giving me this audiobook. It was and. it was not great. I forgot my love hate relationship with urban fiction. They always seem to rushed for me and very detached but this was not that but but just okay. I would try reading or listening to another Tracy Brown novel but I hope urban fiction one day understands that they do not have to be written as ghetto as where they are writing about.

I am a lover of hot urban fiction and this book has hit all the notes for me. The struggle of the Black Woman in real life comes thru on the pages of this book and makes it a step above the traditional urban fiction work. I have been reading Tracy Brown for a while and this is another winner in my book. I will be looking forward to the next one.

I tried this one in print and audiobook and didn’t finish. The narration is good. However, the characters ran together for me and I just didn’t find the story overly compelling. Regarding families in crisis due to imprisonment, Tayari Jones’ An American Marriage is fabulous.