Avery Anderson is 17 years old and being uprooted from her home in DC to small town Georgia to look after her ailing grandmother along with her parents. Avery is very city and looks out of place in this country town and her nose piercing has everyone asking her is shes a lesbian. Avery is a lesbian, but isn’t necessarily ready to be open with the people she’s just met. Avery’s mom left home after graduating, and never looked back, her strained relationship with her mother has caused Avery and her grandmother to have.a nonexistent relationship. When Avery lays eyes on her neighbor Simone Cole she’s immediately smitten. As she watches the interaction between Simones mother and her mother she realizes there’s a tension between them that is odd. As Avery and Grandma Letty spend more time together Grandma Letty begins to break down her walls as she tells stories of the grandfather Avery never knew. Family secrets are soon revealed and everyone’s life is forever changed.

I really enjoyed this YA book. I love the way it explores family dynamics, healing, self love and acceptance. This book was so well written anyone could read it from YA to adults and thoroughly enjoy it.
Thank you @netgalley and @macmillian for this ARC. #YA #teen #YABooks #lgbtqia #blacklgbtqia

A poignant read.

We Deserve Monuments takes us to the South as a girl battles with being herself around her family, navigating school and friendship in a close-minded place, and what it means to love on your own terms. A coming-of-age and identity story told alongside a mystery of generations and family struggles, Hammonds bring to the light what it means to be queer and black in the South in the past and how that impacts the present.

This story is heartbreaking and heart soaring all wrapped in one.

A family filled with dark secrets. Two girls who fall in love, yet have to hide this from the rest of the world. A rich history of systemic racism and privilege still seen in the actions of those in power today. A story that needs to be shared.

Everyone should read this book. Jas Hammonds wrote such a gripping and powerful book that engages the reader in every page.

It was a thought-provoking read. Our teens repetitively check it out. Readers become engrossed in the story from start to end,

New town. Racism. Colorism. Small town.
Ya book with family secrets that impact the new generation.
I loved the storyline. The acceptance of who the main pov is.
The mom. Coming home after leaving and practically escaping the small town. I will say there’s a death and I cried so much.

This is one of my absolute favorites of the year and perhaps one of my favorite YAs ever. I have so much to say yet nothing I say will do this book justice.

Thoughts 💭
This book is exceptionally written. I am an avid YA reader and while this story is accessible in the way YA stories are meant to be, the storytelling/flow of it is so unique and more of what I’d classify as adult contemporary. Parts of it reminded me how Brit Bennett uses the Greek chorus in different parts of The Mothers.

This book hit home for me in so many ways. The heart of this novel is about generational trauma and how the three women, Avery, Avery’s mom, and Avery’s grandma, all reckon with it in different ways. Trauma from being Black in rural Jim Crow era Georgia, being raised by a neglectful but grieving mother as a result, and then being separated from family history for years and feeling disconnected. Trauma that spans and takes new shapes with each woman. Trauma that is not neatly resolved by a single conversation.

Admittedly, because of my own family trauma that is very different from that in novel, I found this difficult to read at first. My knee-jerk reaction was to wonder why Avery would even want a relationship with someone who was hard to love and, in turn, made her feel hard to love. But once I regrouped and parsed through my own shit, I returned & fell even more in love with this book. Everyone needs to be able to heal their trauma differently. For me it is space and distance. For others it’s getting closer to it. It was beautiful to see her work through it in her own way, and, in turn, make me reflect differently on mine.

It’s also deeply queer. The kind of queer that is so enmeshed and woven into the storyline that the identities come as a pair, rather than separate. It’s not a coming out novel, but rather just a coming of age.

Read if you like: Coming of age, pansexual MC, Black families, biracial MC, explorations of grief, stories about being Black & queer in the south, very complex characters

⚠️TWs: Racism, police brutality/KKK, homophobia/lesbophobia, death, murder, cancer, grief, alcoholism, abandonment/neglect, outing

What a stunning, stunning debut. Hammonds expertly weaves together themes of family, love, friendship, and our relationship to the past and future. A total stunner I'll be thinking about for ages.

Hello Again,

I have wanted to read this book ever since I saw the cover image online. I never even read the back of the book but I knew I would want to devour this story, something was just saying this will be a great read. So when I got super duper lucky and the publisher shared a copy with me in exchange for my honest opinions, I couldn’t help but jump in!

SPOILERS AHEAD

Avery has a great life in DC. She lives with her parents, goes to a school she likes, has great friends, makes good grades, and is looking forward to her senior year. But all of that changes kind of suddenly when her family has to temporarily move back to her mother’s home town. Avery’s entire family lives there and she has visited but never spent a ton of time there. This is all changing now, as Avery’s grandmother is dying. Avery is going to be attending school there, living with her grandmother and parent’s in her mother’s old childhood home, and getting to know everyone a bit better. While this is not the senior year Avery envisioned she is going to try to make the most of it and this life experience.

I loved this book more than I could have ever imagined. I found myself caring about and loving every character not just our main character. Avery’s family is wonderful and her new friends are also kind of interesting and fun! I highly recommend this book to anyone and everyone (you may be able to pick up a copy on your Libby app)! On a final note, I want to mention this absolutely drop dead gorgeous cover. It’s stunning and is now one of the books that faces out on my shelf.

Goodreads Rating: 5 Stars

****Thank you so much to the publisher for the ARC copy in exchange for my honest opinions.

Thank you to Net Galley and Macmillan for the ARC in exchange for my honest review. This books centers around Avery Anderson, a seventeen year old that has recently moved from DC to Georgia to her terminally ill grandmother's home just before her senior year in high school. Her grandmother isn't warm and welcoming and there is past family drama that no one wants to talk about. Of course, it seems like a disaster but she finds friendship with two other girls. There is a racist history in the town and one of the girl's mother was murdered and never solved. Avery wants to know more about these different secrets in the past yet she may damage the many relationships with family and friends. This was a good read about belonging, knowing oneself, and dealing with the history of the past.

I absolutely loved this book and everything about it. This book follows Avery Anderson as she struggles with moving to a new place her senior year to live with her terminally ill grandmother in a tense environment due to family secrets. Luckily she meets Simone, her neighbor, and Jade the daughter or the town’s murder family however as these relationships develop more secrets are unveiled. I really liked this book’s portrayal of generational trauma and that was a common theme in a lot of areas. The complexities of race and sexuality were explored in depth and I felt so seen while reading it. The way this book used events from the past and present to tell the story and develop these issues was fantastic. This book read more like a mystery with there being little pieces from the past and present to create a story and I really enjoyed that style. Overall this was a really complex book with some harder social issues but I really enjoyed it and highly recommend it.

Oof this was such an important story that illustrates the multi-generational impact of racism, while tying in many aspects of modern life and an adorable romance.

This book was amazing. It is a bit of a slow boil, so it took me awhile to finally get into it, but when I did, I was really there. The intersections of queer identity, race, womanhood, and coming of age were beautiful and powerful to read and the language was rich and lush. This was a truly special read, something not to be missed.

We Deserve Monuments brings generational pain and suffering into the light. These are things that many families shove away into those deep dark places and let them fester forever. This book teaches young readers why that isn’t the best move. The author brings us into a world that has so many layers, so many families with their own problems, that it makes it seem as if you’re sitting there listening to your friends talk. This is what makes a contemporary book amazing!

Not only does the main character talk about dealing with the same issues that the majority of high school and college aged kids dealt with over the past few years, but the character is also dealing with family issues that many face at one point in their lives. Also, from an educational standpoint, there are many connections that can be made to tie events that occurred in this book to those that happened in the past. We Deserve Monuments is a must for any school!

(4.5 Stars)

This book left me a complete mess. It made me feel so many big emotions, and so many *different* emotions, sometimes on a page-by-page basis. This is the kind of story that takes you to the brink of being overwhelmed, of holding all these seemingly-conflicted ideas and feelings, without ever pushing you over the edge, and it takes an incredible level of craft in order to maintain that balance.

If you want to talk about messy characters and messy families, this is the book. I really love how truthfully this story excavates how impossible it is to reckon with the realities and lived experiences of multiple generations at once. There are three completely different and valid versions of reality co-existing within this one family: with Mama Letty, Avery’s mom, and Avery herself. Each of them feels the truth of their own experience so deeply in their core, and trying to forcefully map that onto the other people in their family is a huge part of what causes friction and conflict in this family.

And I love that this is another story very much not interested in arguing for the characters’ morality. It’s not about whether any of these characters are correct, whether they’re allowed to feel the way they feel, and it’s not about the person with the least amount of mistakes getting to dictate what is right. They’ve all made mistakes, they have all hurt each other and continue to hurt each other as they reckon with this long-standing grief stemming from their family history and even with the slow-coming grief tied to the family’s impending loss.

And it’s a really powerful thing, especially in a story that centers Black characters, when the narrative isn’t that you have to be a good or perfect person in order to be justified in experiencing your emotions. You don’t have to "earn" your feelings. You do not have to contextualize them in someone else’s reality. And conversely, just because you experience pain doesn’t mean you can’t inflict pain just the same as anyone else.

So there’s a lot of complexity there with all the different characters and all the different kinds of relationships. We see how these characters bring each other joy but they also bring each other pain, and how their actions or choices effect each other in a range of ways they could never predict. And that brings me to how this story is so beautifully challenging the reader to hold all that joy and that pain—and every emotion in between—all at once.

I think that’s really where we find the heart of the story. It’s about firmly planting a flag in the complexity of the human experience, and in the fact that we all want to be loved, understood, seen, and to be worthy of remembrance—in both our triumphs and our faults. It really is such a beautiful, multi-faceted, incredibly expressive story.

My one minor note is that there’s a plot twist towards then end that feels a little bit underdeveloped and doesn’t really serve the story in the way I think it was intended. But even taking that into account, reading this story was still such a memorable and moving experience, and I would highly recommend picking this one up.

“I wanted to cry because I didn’t understand how a world so beautiful could also harbor so much pain.”

Thank you to Netgalley t for my claimed copy in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Seventeen-year-old Avery is moving with her parents from Washington to Bardell, Georgia, in order to take care of her terminally ill maternal grandmother, Mama Letty. She isn’t happy about the sudden move, especially when her mother doesn’t even have a good relationship with Letty. Moreover, there is some past secret that they refuse to talk about. As Avery settles into her new school and makes new friends, more secrets come tumbling out, and Avery is left wondering if resolving past issues is more important than maintaining present relationships.
The book comes to us in the first person perspective of Avery.

Throughout this story as I followed Avery I could feel her journey and her story unfolding within me. Her being out and proud of her sexuality was super inspiring! This is a profound and beautifully written book, a testament to YA that takes its readers seriously. I really loved it and I can't wait to read more by Jas Hammonds when it comes. This book is not like any other debut I’ve read, it was done right and I feel the author pour themselves into this book. I’d definitely recommend this book for anyone who likes the YA genre as it has a lot of teenage angst, or someone who wants to see queer representation. It works so seamlessly in this.

This book was super powerful. I love that the character was not only biracial but gay. I think it was super powerful to watch her grow while visiting her grandmother. The part I liked the most was not only how she changed but she changed to be stronger than she was before. A moving story about finding yourself in unlikely places.

This book is a beautifully written coming-of-age story. The cover is stunning, and the writing is so visual. The characters are three-dimensional and the relationships between them felt so real. I also love the way that character histories unfolded throughout the book.

You open a book like We Deserve Monuments and it demands you pay attention. The author came in with such a sure and strong voice, I reveled in the words.

Avery and her parents head down to small town Georgia to spend time with her grandmother who is dying of cancer. There are old family wounds and the book shares the pain of three generations of women who cannot find a way to communicate let alone heal.

Mystery wrapped in prejudice!
Avery goes to her mother’s hometown in Bardell County, Georgia, to take care of Mama Letty, who’s dying from cancer, after being away for twelve years due to the contentious relationship between her mom and Grandmother, Mama Letty. Racism and the Ku Klux Klan destroyed Mama Letty when they killed her husband when Zora, Avery’s mother, was just a baby. Afterwards, Letty drank and checked out and was cruel to Zora and now they continue to be angry with each other. Avery and her father are caught in the crossfire. Scandals and secrets are revealed while Avery tries to break down the hurt between her mother and grandmother before time runs out. Mystery wrapped up in prejudice.

Likes/dislikes: I like the mysteries surrounding the different families in the story and they pulled me into the book. Avery and her father made me chuckle. I like how the author represents all types of people and also the prejudice that still lingers in our society.
Mature content: PG-13 for making out vague descriptions, underage drinking, brief kissing, weed smoking , nondescript kiss.
Language: R for 157 swears and 25 f-bombs.
Violence: PG for murder with no details.
Ethnicity: The characters are predominantly Black and White. Korean American is represented.