Very enlightening book about strong women living with HIV. It was interesting to read about women and their journey dealing with this disease.

Very enlightening book about strong women living with HIV. It was interesting to read about women and their journey dealing with this disease. To the women, thank you for sharing your journey with us. Thanks to Netgalley, the author and the publisher for the ARC of this book in return for my review. Receiving the book in this manner’s had no bearing on this review.

An important and eye-opening read. Author Thurka Sangaramoorthy profiles a group of African American women that are all HIV positive. Interwoven with their stories are a great deal of information concerning HIV/AIDS as well other issues pertinent to the individual stories of each women. The book is informative, and the stories of the women are tales of happiness, difficulty, tragedy, and ultimately survival. Yet, the manner in which it was all presented didn't strike the right tone for this reader. Sangaramoorthy repetitively states her goal is to present a less stereotypical view of the women profiled. And yet each woman in some way falls into one of those very stereotypes. The flow doesn't work either. For example, one of the women talks about being raped as a young woman. Instead of letting the woman's story progress to how that affected her, Sangaramoorthy interrupts with at least 2 paragraphs full of details and stats concerning the prevalence of rape in a certain subset of African American women, throwing off the flow of the woman's story. It became irritating, and in a way extremely disheartening. One doesn't get the feeling of women being survivors, at least not through the words of the author. The women profiled are survivors, although one did sadly pass away during the Covid-19 pandemic. But the author takes away with all the negative statistics regarding African American women.. As an African American woman, this reader was ultimately disappointed. This could have been so much more than what it was.

Thank you for the opportunity, unfortunately this title is only available on the NetGalley shelf app without option to adjust font size and therefore incredibly tedious to read on a phone I will therefore not read it and I'm only sending feedback to remove it from my list which is too bad because I was really interested..