This book is wonderful. The author, Jenny Laden, and I share the identity of being the adult child of an LGBTQ parent. We are also members of the same fantastic LGBTQ organization, COLAGE. While this book is Young Adult genre and very different from my upcoming debut novel, some of the themes in our books overlap, which made me enjoy it even more. A coming-of-age book, it included all the teenage angst many of us remember and perhaps experienced, but heightens it to a larger degree as the main character, Danielle, has a gay father battling AIDS at the dawn of the 1990s.

The book includes drawings and poems, making it feel like you are even deeper in the head and heart of the protagonist. The characters are well developed, and the plot flows nicely. While it is heartbreaking at times, it also pulls at your heart strings in other beautiful, uplifting ways, with themes of found family, new love, friendship, self discovery, and healing.

Danielle is in her senior year of high school with dreams of being an artist and attending the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design. As if school and college plans aren’t stressful enough, Danielle has to deal with her uncle’s death and her father’s HIV diagnosis. Set in the early 90s in the height of the AIDS epidemic, this book follows Danielle as she navigates life and loss.

This is a really beautiful story. I found Danielle frustrating at times, but she learned and grew a lot over the course of the book. I loved the supporting characters, from Danielle’s friends Amy and Marco to her father’s friends Robert and Susie. They all supported Danielle in different ways and helped her deal with her grief, anger, and anxiety. While this story focuses on the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 80s/90s, it provides valuable lessons on finding your voice and fighting against injustice that can be applied to any issue, as seen on a smaller scale with Danielle standing up to bullies and her school’s administration. This is a heavy book, and I cried a few times, but it ends on a hopeful note.Thanks to NetGalley, Blackstone Publishing, and Jenny Laden for this free ARC in exchange for my honest review.

This book was very hard in many ways. Danielle was an incredibly compelling main character and the way she told the story was great. We see her going through normal, average situations and having to make decisions about her future while she deals with the emotional impact of her dad's health. I loved the way the story was so intertwined with art, not only in the media of Danielle's diary that we were able to see but also in the way it was prevalent in the story itself, the way it was discussed as a form of protest and its importance in culture and social change. Yes, it is a heavy story, but so very full of love, between Danielle and her dad, but also between her friends and her father's friends and their family. The main character is growing and learning about a lot of hard and difficult things, and we learn along with her. The discussions we see about grief and disruption as part of protests and community, friendship, family and so many other things is something I will carry with me for a long time. Please be aware of the content warnings, but this is one I would absolutely recommend.

CW: death of a parent, grief, homophobia, medical content, outing, terminal illness, death.

Unfortunately this book didn’t work for me and was a DNF but I am sure other readers will feel differently! Thank you for the ARC!

Fans of John Green, Jennifer Niven, and Bill Konigsberg will appreciate this story about friendship, family, and heartache.

Set in the 90’s in Philadelphia and at a boarding school, this YA novel tells the story of Danielle, a high school senior, who learns that her gay father is HIV positive. Dani expected to spend the fall of her senior year prepping her portfolio for her application to art school. Now she must navigate typical teen challenges (crushes, roommates, her school’s unfair focus on sports instead of arts) as well as a consuming worry for her father and his health. At a time when having a gay dad wasn’t easily discussed, let alone a dad with HIV, Dani must keep her worries to herself, expressing them through her art or poetry. The novel is interspersed with Dani’s drawings and poetry.

This book is heavy.

This is the kind of book that consumes and makes you think. The kind that inspires the reader to open up their minds as well as their eyes to injustices that are blatant but people avoid because it’s easier than trying to fight what seems like an insurmountable battle.

At its heart, this is a coming of age story of a girl on the cusp of adulthood, who thought she had everything figured out until she had her whole world come crashing down around her. A story of loss, self-discovery, and taking ownership of mistakes, Danielle navigates her reality in a messy, authentic way that is raw and powerful. Her processing, her grief, her anger, all resonate throughout the story in perfect unity with her passion, spirit, and love for those around her.

I had a hard time writing this review or really, trying to figure out how to rate it. I almost didn’t give it a rating. On one hand, this book is important. It’s eye-opening and necessary. People didn’t really talk about AIDs in the 1990s and they still don’t today. It’s like Danielle so aptly notes in the book, a monster that is lurking in the shadows that with continued ignorance we won’t know how to face or defeat. But we need to talk about it. We need to bring awareness and educate so that people can not only be safe, but accepting of difference without prejudice. On the other hand, it took me a lot of persistence to get into it, but I’m glad I did. The pacing was slow at first, and some of Danielle’s commentary about the division between the art students and the jocks was off-putting, just because it felt like her perception was so one-sided and almost arrogant at times. There was a moment in this story that I cringed so hard and was so angry at Danielle. Angry at her selfishness and sense of self-righteousness that caused others to be hurt. At the same time, this was perfect for a coming of age story-learning the hard way and reevaluating how the character perceives the world.

The book contains drawings and poems, mixed in with the narrative. The chapters are named after songs. I’m not sure how to feel about the multimedia approach. In some ways, the drawings brought the characters to life and other ways, they were abstract pieces that encompassed Danielle’s internal conflict. I preferred the poems to the drawings. They were where the emotion really soared and Danielle’s feelings were on full display. The words of Danielle’s heart, where she could be honest with herself.

I wasn’t fully invested in the characters themselves but I was invested in the story. I felt as though I couldn’t connect with Danielle but I could empathize with her situation. As someone who lost her father suddenly and unexpectedly, all of Danielle’s consuming and confusing emotions felt like reliving the past. The sense of loss, of distorted reality, of things happening far too quickly and trying to figure out how to function in a new reality where a hole exists where a person who made up your whole world should be. It’s heartbreaking and real. Anyone who has lost someone they loved will recognize everything Danielle is going through. Honestly, I knew it was coming but I still felt gutted by these scenes. Maybe it was too soon for me.

All in all, this was a read that will definitely ignite feelings but what those feelings will be depends on the reader.

This is a beautifully written book. The mix of prose, poetry, and drawings added depth to the main character, Danielle. Your heart breaks as you experience the rawness of her pain as she watched her father die from AIDS. The stigma surrounding the disease and how it rapidly swept through the gay community meant that many died isolated and alone. I couldn't help but relate this to the recent COVID pandemic in which many loved ones passed away alone as their families were kept away. I bawled through the last portion of the book as Danielle, her brother, and her dad's friends surrounded her father with love during his last days. The power of this story is that it teaches empathy, acceptance, and the importance of using your talents to speak out against injustice. It's a must have for YA library collections.

What a moving story.

Having drawn on her own experience, Layden creates a compelling story about the dark days of HIV, AIDS, and homophobia in the 90s. Danielle has to face the world in which people are so scared of the queer community that they don’t want to help them find a cure for this life threatening disease.
As a visual person, I really enjoyed the illustrations that went along with the narrative. However, I thought the poems along with the drawings were a little excessive. I found myself skipping those, but that’s because I’m not really into poetry.
Overall, I genuinely enjoyed this book. Tough topics were discussed and tears were shed.

I had no idea what I was in for when I started this book. I truly could not have been more naive about the contents of this story.
What I thought would be a fun collection of mixed media pieces turned out to be a moving story about coming-of-age, finding your voice, navigating life changing decisions, fighting injustice, and the love between a child and their parent.
I found Jenny Laden's writing to be perfectly aligned with the headspace of a teenage girl who is struggling, and learning, and making mistakes, and opening her eyes to the world around her. Laden makes you not just feel for our main character, Danielle, but she makes the reader feel like Danielle. The poetry interspersed throughout this book allows the reader to dive even deeper into Danielle's thoughts and feelings.
All of this takes place with the backdrop of an ongoing and horrifying health crisis. We see Danielle have her eyes open to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, we see her start to learn about it, we see her begin to realize that she wants to use her voice and her art to spread information about HIV/AIDS, and we see as this disease directly impacts her life and her future.
Overall, I feel Laden has put together a wonderful story with great use of art and poetry throughout.

Thank you to NetGalley and Blackstone Publishing for providing me an ARC.

The format of this book was a challenge for me to get into. The handwritten sections are quite reminiscent of those YA books from the 90s I couldn't get enough of. The story overall was beautiful and told in a way that helps you feel like you were there with her, dealing with the AIDS epidemic along side her.

Heading into her senior year, Danielle has all the usual things to deal with-college applications, boys, a school where she doesn't fit. But then she finds out her dad is HIV positive, and the things she thought mattered start to feel superficial.

I think there is a lot to like in this book. It discusses the terrifying time of the 90s for the queer community in a young adult context, broaching the topics of HIV, AIDS, and homophobia in ways that are normally reserved for adult literature. With this in mind, I'd say the book is doing important work and I'm glad to see it's being published.

With all of that said though, it was not my favorite book. It's pitched as a 'multimedia' work, but I honestly felt that the multimedia elements detracted from the overall quality of the book. I think the illustrations were great to include since the main character is an artist, but the poems felt a tad trite, and I found myself skipping them most of the time. In reality, this book is pretty standard in its presentation, mostly comprised of traditional narrative writing.

While I found the story compelling and felt the characters were well-rendered, I wasn't a huge fan of the writing overall. The teenage dialogue felt a little stilted, and I found that there were some instances that felt a little soap-box-esque. Information was conveyed a little clunkily, which meant it felt very accurate, but it didn't feel organic and tended to bring the narrative drive to a halt.

I can appreciate that this book is doing a lot of good work in how it handles difficult topics for a YA audience, but overall, I wasn't a huge fan.

While I loved the concept of the book, the execution just felt off. I did not feel like I was reading about a teenager but someone much younger. Might just be me but it kept me from being able to enjoy the book

Somehow, when reading this, i was also listening to a period piece book about queerness and boarding schools and considering the future through the lens of homophobia and AIDS. it was very confusing to balance the two! That's just a fun fact about me.

This book made everyone in it complicated. It didn't let anyone off the hook and also didn't make anyone wholly terrible (at least not any major characters). The drawings were a nice addition but i didn't feel like they added too much to the book. The handwritten parts made me feel like i was reading a Baby-Sitters Club book, which was fine, but just like in the BSC books i had a hard time not just fully skipping over them. That might be a me-issue, but just some feedback.

I was moved by the experiences of the MC as a teenage girl who had many loved ones that were gay men, in the midst of the AIDS crisis. It looked at the fear, the silence, and also the deep love and connections and organizing that were happening. I think it's worth having as a window into that moment through the lens of a straight teenage girl. Good for HS libraries, and maybe middle school libraries as well.

NetGalley ARC.