thistle_and_verse's reviews
299 reviews

Very disappointed in this book. It felt like it was trying to do a lot with very limited space, and I thought Dawson spent too much time on the 'black kids thought it was weird that I was into metal' storyline. It felt like there was 2 chapters of that before the book even picked up steam, and that point still got revisited without much nuance later in the book. Organizationally, it was confusing because black American's experiences and histories were conflated with black Canadians', and there wasn't an explanation of why Dawson felt confident doing that when it seemed like the demographics and history were completely different. Basics aren't really explained (what is metal? what does it take to be considered a metalhead? what are the different ways to be involved in the metal scene? etc.), so I was unsure how she came to certain conclusions. There were informative snippets (marketing advice, history of the genres, etc.), but they were few and far between (at this point, I think I knew everything about the 60s rock history just from reading articles people post yearly during Black History Month). The biggest disappointment was the repeated contradictions and soft-peddling of racism within metal. Dawson would praise performers like Memphis Minnie for their sexuality and say that women shouldn't be judged and then say that Lil Kim and Foxy Brown were singlehandedly holding back women in rap with their sexual personas. Dawson implied that black people questioning the safety of hard rock shows were profiling, then compared the creation of punk music to ethnic cleansing (backlash to disco), talked about the history of metal icons using racist slurs with little pushback and mistreatment at shows, and even some of the black people interviewed described very racist behavior from their white metalhead friends. Theoretically I should've been an easy sell for this book (was friends with metalheads, casually listened to hard rock), but overall the read was alienating and didn't hold my attention. Not rigorous and very lacking in analysis.

This black, sapphic small town romance is a quick read. It was like 70 pages in the ebook, and I read it in like 2 hours. Given that amount of space, we don't get too deep into Imari or the love interest Cassidy's back stories, it's just foot on the gas. Their relationship moves pretty quick because they're already familiar from being childhood friends without any of the hangups about romance possibly ruining the friendship. There were a few type-os in the Kindle version, which I was able to read around. Imari and Cassidy's date was cute. The sex was good. I had fun with this read.