Cas Lester

Representation: A main character with dyslexia, a side Asian character
Trigger warnings: Refugee experiences, grief and loss depiction, death of relatives, divorce, military violence and war themes, gun violence, physical injury, implied PTSD, displacement
This review can also be found on: The StoryGraph
Score: Seven points out of ten.

First, that is a lot of trigger warnings, so be careful before reading this if you don't want to get triggered by any of these. Now that I said that, I had this on my to-read pile for a while, and one of the two libraries I regularly go to has this, so not long after, I picked it up, cracked it open and at first, I thought it would be about chocolate, but no! It went in an unexpectedly different direction from what I first thought. It starts with the main character, Jaz, whose last name I forgot. What sets her apart from other characters is that she has dyslexia, and I don't know of any other character who has this (except one.) The book does have a few unique things going for it. For starters, I didn't like the writing style at times when it used Internet slang that should've been reserved for text messages or social media scenes and of course, the adverb overuse like they were "virtually" everywhere and "literally" on every page if you know what I mean. Oh, and the typos and the all-caps are so frustrating to read. After a few pages, Jaz meets Nadima, the new girl, but here's the remarkable thing about her. One, Nadima is a refugee. Two, she's either Syrian or Kurdish and three, she doesn't speak much English, but the blurb lied when it said she doesn't speak English.

At first, Jaz does not know how exactly to approach Nadima, and sometimes she makes some wrong decisions (a lot of them) that almost made me lower the rating to three stars if it wasn't for the redemption when Jaz and Nadima got along again after Jaz used her as a charity case when she needed support. I liked when Jaz tried the Turkish Delight chocolate and also the emoji scenes when she couldn't use English due to the language barrier, but, on occasions, I didn't get the book like why did Jaz decide to sell chocolate when A, no one wanted it and B, it was against the rules? Another time, the family tree project triggered Nadima since some of her family died in the war, but Jaz calls that insensitive and shouts at a teacher. That refugee part was hard to read, but it's in the vein of No Ballet Shoes in Syria or Inside Out and Back Again. The ending was nice when Jaz went to a Kurdish restaurant, and as I said earlier, she restored her friendship, ending this on a high note.… (más)