Excuse Me While I Ugly Cry - Joya Goffney

 

Title: Excuse Me While I Ugly Cry
Author: Joya Goffney 
Format: E-Book 
Rating: 5 Stars 

Excuse Me While I Ugly Cry is a book that every teenager should be reading right now!  It's well written, relevant, funny at times, and so full of heart and emotion.

Quinn is teen who loves to keep lists - she uses it as a way to get her emotions out because she hates talking about her feelings out loud.  Enter Carter, a boy at her school who mistakenly grabs her journal, and then reads it and, after a busy moment in class, forgets it in a classroom.  Bullying ensues, but so does a lot of really great stuff that drastically improves Quinn's life. 

Quinn and Carter are teenagers who both face hurdles you'd expect like parental expectations, snotty "friends", all those wonderful teachers at school. They also have to try and navigate life around their white peers and friends, most of whom are completely unaware of their racism and the microaggressions they are committing. 

I honestly can't think of a single thing I didn't like about this book.  I loved the story, the characters the development of every single thing. This is definitely a book that will leave lasting imprints on me for a long long time. 

The characters in this book were all so wonderful and so well written, and the author portrayed their experiences as teens very well.  (Take that opinion for what it is - I am 40 after all, so it's been a while since I was a teenager.) Each character was unique unto themselves, and there was a lot of growth in our two main characters, Quinn and Carter.  They both developed a great sense of who they were, Quinn especially. She grew from someone who was afraid to let things out, and bottled things inside, to someone her grandma knew she could be.

The connection Quinn and Carter had with each other was great.  They started out in this awkward, weird, helping each other space, but the vibe between them was there from the beginning.  They grew into that and developed and learned about and from each other so much. 

I think the author did a great job of showing that these teens are still so young, but that they have the ability to grow and change and make decisions.  Yes, teens are still developing, their brains and bodies are still changing, but they are smarter than people realize, and they have the ability, given the right skill development, to make decisions and solve problems.  The author showed that so well.  

I really loved everything about this book, and it's a book I'd recommend to everyone!