I'm Not Dying with You Tonight (Kimberly Jones and Gilly Segal)

I'm Not Dying with You Tonight
Kimberly Jones and Gilly Segal
Sourcebooks Fire
Fiction, YA General Fiction
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Lena's popular and fashionable, always the center of attention in her group of friends, with a boyfriend whose music is about to break big any day now. Campbell is the polar opposite: withdrawn, friendless, just trying to get through senior year at a strange school in a strange city with a dad she barely knows. Ordinarily, their lives would never overlap.
This night is anything but ordinary.
An argument at a football game goes from slurs to shoves to cops to guns, so fast nobody quite knows what happens. Campbell and Lena wind up stranded together, a white girl and a black girl, companions of circumstance in the middle of the violence. All they want to do is get to their homes - but this city is a tinder box, and it's about to go up in flames.

REVIEW: This is an intense and timely book on race relations, riots, and learning to see past preconceptions, not to mention the importance of being aware of one's surroundings: not just the locations, but the people and neighbors who can make all the difference in difficult times. Lena has all sorts of friends, but when the chips are down the only one on hand is Campbell, a virtual stranger she (like pretty much everyone at school) always dismissed as a nobody. Campbell has been abandoned, in essence and fact, by everyone in her life - her mother ran off to a job in Venezuela, tearing her from her Pennsylvania home and sending her across the country ot her father, who doesn't put too much effort into creating a relationship with his only child - and isn't about to reach out for new connections when they're just as likely to disappear on her... but her self-imposed isolation doesn't protect her when the long-simmering anger and frustration of the city boil over. Both girls have something to learn from each other, especially Campbell, whose racial blinders are torn off when she has to confront assumptions and prejudices she's carried around without questioning her whole life. Lena has some assumptions about people that get some harsh and needed updating, too. Things move fast, with some unexpected character moments and plenty of tension as fear and survival bring out the best and worst in everyone. There's a chilling, borderline surreal air to how quickly things unravel, from a simple school scuffle to violence and looting and cops marching down the street like invading soldiers. The wrap-up feels slightly abrupt, though overall it's a solid story with a good message that doesn't need to bludgeon the reader to get its point across.

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