A review by hannahelaine
Seven Days in June by Tia Williams

Did not finish book. Stopped at 36%.
DNF @ 36%. I honestly am just getting a lot of cognitive dissonance from this book? It literally has a “The State of the Black Author” panel in the book that condemns blaxploitation in media, and how there needs to be more black joy and showing black people as literally just any other person instead of deeply and always traumatized. And then it seems (to me, who is a white person) to do exactly the opposite and be the paragon of blaxploitation.  Maybe I’m missing something since this book isn’t written for me specifically and I don’t have the cultural context for it. I don’t know. But it seems very dissonant in what it’s saying and doing. It feels icky. I may be misinterpreting the author— I certainly haven’t stumbled on any black reviewers saying the same thing, so I may be totally getting it wrong. But it feels icky for me, so I’m just going to leave it. 

I honestly don’t even have thoughts on the romance or even the plot because that has overshadowed everything else for me.  I feel weird about it and I’m just not going to continue. 

Finally, this is a little more a nitpick than criticism on the book, but some content warnings would be good to put in this one. There’s a lot of extremely dangerous self-harming situations. I didn’t know this going in, and recently have been having pretty bad mental health issues requiring partial hospitalization. Luckily It didn’t throw my mood or thoughts in a bad direction, but it could have. A little warning ahead of time would have been nice. 
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