SYNOPSIS
Lil is fresh out of a juvenile detention center, on probation, trying to figure out who she wants to be.
RECAP AND REVIEW
Thank you to HarperCollins Children’s Books, Quill Tree Books, the author, and Netgalley for an arc!
Pub Date: September 15, 2026
This is currently a standalone young adult fiction book with some poetry scattered throughout it.
The writing in this book is poetic yet personable to me, which is no surprise since the author is a National Poetry Slam Champion. Off the writing alone, I would give this book five stars. I really enjoyed how the story was told and the poetry pieces brought everything together nicely. I definitely need to check out more from this author.
On one hand, the storytelling was beautifully done, and I found myself connecting with Lil, even when I didn’t agree with her choices. The scenes we got inside the juvenile center and, in general, following Lil while she’s on probation is a perspective worth telling and was one of the most interesting parts of the story to me. I really liked Lil as a character and appreciate how the story talks about people who’ve made mistakes, emphasizing that there are more to people than their mistakes.
It’s just that it’s unclear what Lil is going through that makes her so impulsive and angry, which she talks about a little herself. The uncertainty may be the point, because in real life, the “why” sometimes doesn’t matter. The “why” doesn’t make people less or more deserving of basic respect and humanity, but in some ways, a teeny part of me is unsatisfied, as a reader, because I wasn’t understanding Lil’s character motivations behind some of the choices she made in the past and was making in the present. It was all explained as “not knowing why”, and I know this is YA and that’s a teenage answer, but it’s still unsatisfying for me because even through Lil not knowing, no part of her tried to understand why either.
The book brought up questions for me, like:
- Who decides what the “right” thing is?
- Is it really necessary to control high school students so much they can’t go to the bathroom when they need to?
- What is a good reason to break parole?
- Will the court system ever decide there is a good reason to break parole?
- How does the court system decide how many chances someone, especially those who are children, young adults, and BIPOC, gets?
- Would I, would you, risk your freedom the way Lil did?
- Who is allowed second chances?
A lot goes on in this book. Lil is navigating high school on parole with an ankle monitor, without her friends. And even with the weight of her next hearing following her, she is still a kid with a crush and at the center of high school rumors and judgements. I really enjoyed the friends she made along the away.
Aside from that, Lil noticed changes in her older brother that are concerning. The mental health rep, from the perspective of a loved one, is the other part of the story that kept me really interested. I thought it was handled with care and in a realistic way with how different family members coped and addressed it.
All of the characters in the book are complex, distinguishable, and have their own full backstories. They’re all trying to do the best they can with their circumstances, which was overall refreshing.
By the end of the book, the different plot points all come together to shape how the story ends, which is on a cliffhanger. I wish it didn’t end that way, but I walked away from the story accepting that it did and ultimately, I do think it adds a lot to the story to let people marinate on what they think (and blindly hope) could happen.
In this book there are themes of identity, judgement and justice, freedom, forgiveness, second chances, and friendship and family, with discussions on the role of juvenile system on young people’s lives.
Read for:
🚆 Mental Health Rep
🚆 FMC on Parole
🚆 Commentary on the Juvenile System
🚆 Poetry Written Throughout
🚆 Characters That Feel Human
🚆 Indigenous Salvadoran and Afro-Dominican rep
OVERALL
Overall, I give this book a 4.75 out of 5 stars. This book is one of my favorites of the year and will stay with me for a little bit. I cried at the end. There’s so much to love about this book and many gems in it; I’ll probably have to reread it to capture it all fully. I recommend this for people who like complex characters and who are okay with not having all the answers.
What do you think?