Sadie is looking forward to summer with her girlfriend and an internship! But, just as summer is about to kick off, Sadie witnesses a racist assault at the lake. Sadie already lives with chronic anxiety and has learned how to manage panic attacks. As she reckons with racism & mental health, Sadie no longer feels safe to leave her home and is diagnosed with agoraphobia. From her Ruckus account, @OneAnxiousBlackGurl Sadie shines a light on the intersectionality of race and mental health. Mariama J. Lockington, an adoptee author whom I wholeheartedly admire, writes this book for anxious, queer, Black girls. For those in the “what if’s” and those who deserve the space to feel their emotions to the fullest. An important and necessary read!

I loved this book and the cover was absolutely beautiful.
Thank you netgalley for allowing me to read this ARC. I WILL DEFINITELY BE PURCHASING THIS BOOK

This book is such an emotional ride and I found it near-impossible to put down.

Sadie has been coping with her generalized anxiety for years, but after she watches cops unjustly attack a young Black woman, she is suddenly finding it impossible to walk down the front stairs because “what if what if what if.” As she works on coping and healing and adding new tools to her tool box, Sadie is also trying to use her platform and her voice to bring more attention and justice to Corinne, shining a spotlight on the ways being Black and Brown in America too often results is targeted violence in harassment. Told in verse, this book gripped me tight and did not let go. And to be clear, this is not a story exclusively focused on pain and trauma, but instead a story of reclaiming joy, because Black queer joy is resistance.

Sadie’s anxiety was so relatable and her many panic attacks over the course of the summer were a lot to read. But I love how her story shows her working through her panic and working on her anxiety and having support in her family, her friends, and her therapist. It was so hard to see how hard she was struggling to get back to old routines and the things she loved when the thought of leaving her safe space brought on a panic attack.

I also really loved how this book is so much about community and collective action. Sadie uses Ruckus, an app similar to TikTok, to share her journey with anxiety over the summer and through her lives makes connections and helps people. She also starts a collective action to center and prioritize joy, sharing joy because their joy and survival is an act of resistance in our white suprematist and capitalistic society. Using stories of joy as a way to keep going forward was such a great aspect to use.

Overall I really enjoyed this emotional story and love everything about it. It was definitely not always an easy book to read, but it hit me in all the best places!

[CannonballRead will post May 20, 2023]

Sadie struggles to manage chronic anxiety on the best of days, but when her girlfriend Aria breaks up with her and they immediately witness a young Black woman confronted by a white woman and arrested by the police, Sadie has a panic attack that leads to the inability to leave her house. When she can't even walk to the garage to release her tension through boxing, she turns to social media to post livestreams where she talks about mental health and her desire for social justice. And while her best friend Evan, her brother Charlie, and her therapist take the lead in helping Sadie face her fears, she also finds unexpected support from her handsome new neighbor, Johnson.

This powerful novel-in-verse brings together so many themes that have dominated our lives over the past few years: the need for better mental health care during the pandemic and other social crises, the ongoing threat to Black lives and the rage and frustration behind the push for justice, the power of social media to connect us, and the joy of finding one's own voice. Sadie is a beautifully complex character, vulnerable and fragile at times but strong in her passion for justice and her willingness to face her mental health issues and find a sustainable path forward. Her supportive family sometimes doesn't know how best to support her, and she doesn't always know how to articulate her difficulties with them, so their path forward isn't an easy one, but it's completely relatable.

I really appreciated all the nuance that Lockington included in the story: the acknowledgement that therapy has been and often still is stigmatized in the Black community, the differences in the Black experience, and the intersectionality of being a young queer Black woman. Yet even with all the pain and fear that Sadie acknowledges in her story, she ultimately holds on to joy. That's something we all need, but we especially need to make more room for Black joy in our stories and our world.

What an amazing story! I could not put it down. Five stars.

Thank you, Farrar Straus Giroux and NetGalley, for providing an eARC of this book. Opinions expressed here are solely my own.