But I Am Not Your Baby Mother resonates beyond race – and should strike a chord with any mother alienated by stereotypical images of motherhood. When Brathwaite first became a mother, she was more worried about paying the electricity bill than whether her child’s food was organic. “If my child is not crying through hunger, I’m winning. The time to fuss is itself a privilege.” Anyways…..I feel like my thoughts are legit all over the place. All in all, I LOVED this book. I rate it HIGHLY and I would recommend this book to ANYONE and EVERYONE.

Thank God you’re married!” exclaimed the clerk. Upon seeing our expressions, she added hastily: “I’m sure you’re very much in love, but it just gives me far less paperwork to do!” She laughed, and I couldn’t help but join her. She was, like me, looking at marriage for the practicality it is. A woman after my own heart. It was a memoir, but also well researched - with statistics about population, health, names, and racism scattered through. I loved both characters I just wish there was more of a plot, as this book heavily just felt like a short period of Cynthia's life in which she was trying to come to terms with her brothers death, and if anything the book actually left more questions than answers, so the ending really did bother me.Wow. Where do I even begin with this book. Cuts Both Ways is like an onion. There are layers. On the surface level it is about a boy and a girl who fall in love. On a deeper level it is a Romeo and Juliet tale with a basis in crime. On a deeper level it is about the socio-political and economic values and expectations that the BPOC community face on a daily basis.

Cuts Both Ways is a riveting mixture of contemporary, romance and mystery that completely captures your mind. She doesn’t just mean beige “in terms of skin tone but in personality, in performance, in content being rolled out”. When she started her blog in 2016, “there was no other version out there. If you weren’t white and middle-class with this certain set of mummy friends, it just felt like you were sitting on the outskirts looking in.” I thought this book had the potential to be a good book, but instead, it was underwhelming and poorly written. I am no stranger to Candice Brathwaite’s writing; I'm certainly not a fan, but I do believe she has produced much better work than this without sounding too rude. I do not think fictional writing is for everyone. The thing that causes a lot of Young Adult books to be unsuccessful is that people write for an audience that they don’t already have. Unless you're well-established like John Green, you have to develop your style of writing before trying to put yourself in a box for a specific genre. Cuts Both Ways did a poor job of targeting a particular audience. The characters had so much potential, especially our main characters, Cynthia and Issac, but they were underdeveloped and rushed. Their interaction and inner thoughts throughout the book were very amateur and cringe-worthy. It was so evident that this book was written by someone much, much older with not much sense of modern youthfulness and their interaction.If 2020 was the year the world decided it was time for a proper conversation about racism, then 2021 is definitely the year we need to face up to colourism. Colourism is discrimination against dark-skinned people. It comes from within the community as well as without, and is an issue across many races, including mine.