i am both glad to be done reading this & glad to have read it.

i’ve never spent more than A YEAR STALLED at less than 30% finished but the characters & action stayed haunting me until i came back, determined to finish. i’d say i spent another year rereading the first bit & then reading 30-50%, but i managed to find my footing & enjoy the ride.

i enjoyed the plot & the writing ~style but also was perpetually confused as it feels like there is VERY little context provided early on. this book does approximately 0 explaining before the halfway mark. my specific brand of neurodivergent is pattern recognition & a NEED to understand so i spent so long being flummoxed ab the personalities, the townspeople, the lore of Boren/Inshill. however, i do feel like Mueller ultimately satisfied my expectations by the conclusion, making my struggle worthwhile as the story did deliver on nearly all fronts.

i read quite a few reviews before trying to write my own bc i feel i have pretty complicated feelings about this book. while i know the book is written by a POC author & the author’s note states that much of her inspiration pulled from her ancestors, i can’t help feeling that this book or Junie’s story is, in places, white washed, or quite removed from the actual experience of slavery. it doesn’t feel at all accurate to the time or the experience of enslaved people in 1860s alabama. while i absolutely understand that not all novels about slavery have to be so harrowing and dark, Junie’s eloquent vocabulary, her refusal to work hard, and her garbage attitude toward most of her family, would not fair well for her. the authors note is important & provides some context for how & why the novel is written as it is and maybe my opinion is irrelevant on the matter. i can appreciate a bit of a different perspective with regard to an enslaved person as a “house girl” but even that feels removed from what horrors were more accurate. it’s a book version of “it wasn’t all bad,” and while that may be true, more white people in particular need to understand how BAD IT ALL WAS before referencing this novel as a portrayal of slavery.

anyway, Junie as a 16 yr old protagonist was downright annoying in places and the novel could have been a whole lot shorter if she spent less time making major messes and then refusing to communicate with anyone about them. it felt like a lot of the novel’s meat is tied up in Junie’s juvenile behavior which ended up being a detractor for the pacing of the novel.