Pride

they started throwing coffee cakes and pancake mix on zuriii mannnnn

The book is basically racist and zuri is just a brat with no pape lil bro cuz on my mama and drew started crying and throwing up and shii

When I first read the plot of Pride, I was pretty neutral about it. The plot seemed basic and overdone, a typical teen romance book, but my standards were way too high for it. So what was the plot? Well, in a nutshell, Zuri lives in the hood (trust me this is a fact you won’t miss no matter how hard you try) and when a rich boy moves in, she instantly hates him. But of course (because of totally unpredictable unfortunate circumstances) she ends up having to spend time with him and loving him. Of course this is a teen romance novel so their relationship is rocky, they scream at each, then kiss and make up. Nothing new. This plot was basic and boring but not necessarily bad, especially since with ok writing and ok character portrayal it could have been fine and I wouldn’t have felt the need to make this review. But that wasn’t the case. First off, the writing. It was too boring. If I was going to hear the author talk, I would 100% except that she would keep a monotone voice while talking. The writing was that boring. It was either this or exaggerated extremely. As someone who has also written things, I think I can sympathize and relate to what the author is going through. Some parts of the book you are just more passionate with than others and you can tell in the writing vs. having slightly different tones of writing to represent different parts in the book. There were also quite a few writing mistakes one such being when Zuri goes to Howard. We are told nothing of a character than this (obviously this girl was a minor character and I understand that but we are given two things about her in this order): 1. She looks at Zuri with a “dead look”. 2. She gets an “even brighter smile”. This is incorrect because her smile, if she had one ealier, wasn’t bright. It was little things like that that makes the reader want to rip their hair out of their head, like I often did. But enough about bashing the absolute horrible writing. You get the point. Now I want to talk about the characters, more specifically the character growth. Darius is a main character so we should be able to see a line of character growth without a steep slope. Things shouldn’t happen overnight even though they did. For both Zuri and Darius. But it’s easier to criticize this from Darius’s character portrayal. We see him at the block party and then a couple times after that. He’s being not rude but very cold and icy. Which is fine since, goddamn, Zuri can’t shut up about him not being “real black”. I just mean I think his coldness was justified. Anyways he then goes away for a bit before Zuri and him totally realistically run into each other in DC. And suddenly he’s Mr. Nice Guy. He compliments Zuri’s poems, invites her to dinner, begs to take her home. When they have had no communication before previously hating each other. We are given no explanation for this quick change I behavior. Even Zuri changes quickly too. She has “conflicting feelings” but it’s written so poorly I never really felt the impact of that. Either way she seems to instantly fall for him after he’s nice to her for a couple hours when before we saw little to nothing of attraction before (most of it in the writing seemed forced and like just going through the motions to say you used foreshadowing so I’m really not counting that). But that’s just how it is. “I hate you” instantly turns into “I love you” at the snap of the author’s fingers with no explanation. So if we chatted character growth it’d be a flat line that instantly shot up higher only to continue being a flat line. Also that’s mostly on the emotional side of things since Zuri still remains completely closed off to the idea that anything not black and hood aren’t bad. Throughout the entire book. She never lets go of that extremely toxic and damaging mindset. I would’ve loved to see Zuri step off her high horse on her own (not being pushed off) and seen some viable character growth there. But alas, my wish wasn’t granted. As a bonus, I would like to briefly add onto that horrible mindset Zuri has. Remember when I said previously that it wouldn’t slip your mind that Zuri lives in the hood? It’s because how many times the author brings it up. I was going to say something exaggerated about how often she brings it up but I don’t even have to exaggerate the facts to prove my point! I genuinely don’t think there is a single page were it isn’t brought up in some way, shape, or form. Zuri truly believes that anyone who isn’t both black and hood are dumb, boring, privileged people. She truly thinks, feels, and acts that way and never lets that go or change. Instead the only “character growth” (I’m using this term loosely) we get from her is how she feels about a boy. The author clearly also has this mindset to some degree (to what degree I’m not sure but pretty high at least) so I find it almost pointless t try to argue with her if you aren’t both black and hood. I felt like everything was fake and forced when trying to portray the hood, mostly that being of the dialogue. But I digress because I wouldn’t know huh? But by reading other reviews it seems others with experience agree that the author seemed to be writing about the hood from a perspective of someone who wishes they could brag about living there, but didn’t. But once again, I digress. I guess I lied, I need to add this on. The poems were shown as this one spectacular thing Zuri was good at when the poems were written at a middle school level at best. Not by a senior in high school. The author really just thought she wrote great poems and wanted to put them out their for praise through Zuri. Too bad they were both bad and forced. Ibi Zoboi, you might have some potential but wouldn’t count on that too much based off this book. It was so bad to the point were my body physically rejected it, I spent most of my time reading it rolling my eyes. Many time I just had to put the book down and leave the room. I’ve had to do that with other books but it’s been because it’s too good or interesting. Yours was the first one I ever put down and walked away from becuase it was so incredibly bad. Congrats I guess. Please please please listen to your criticism and learn from it and don’t just brush it off as hate. It will be better for all of us. Thank you.