review:

title: Color Me In | Goodreads
author: Natasha Diaz
where to buy (pre-order): Powell’s City of Books | The Novel Neighbor 
publishing: August 20th 2019 by Delacorte
format: advanced copy
source: publisher
genre: YA; contemporary
date read: January 2019

Debut YA author Natasha Díaz pulls from her personal experience to inform this powerful coming-of-age novel about the meaning of friendship, the joyful beginnings of romance, and the racism and religious intolerance that can both strain a family to the breaking point and strengthen its bonds.

thoughts:

Color Me In by Natasha Diaz is, quite frankly, one of the first YA books that I have read in months.  While traveling throughout my gap semester I didn’t have as much access to books (or time to read) as I would have liked–but when I did find a moment to dive into a book I found myself gravitating more towards adult novels or memoirs. My reading tastes shift constantly (sometimes even based on my mood) so it was just a matter of time before another YA landed in my hands.  Nonetheless, Color Me In struck me as an ARC that I just had to pick up.

For one thing, the cover design of this novel is gorgeous.  I really hope that this is the version that will be finalized and published when the novel is eventually released in August.  From there, the premise of the story was utterly captivating.  Color Me In focuses on Nevaeh, a sixteen year old girl whose parents crumbling marriage combined with the particular cruelties of teenage existence force her to confront her biracial identity for the first time.  Based almost entirely off of the Diaz’s own experiences, Color Me In strives to represent the ambiguous, the uncertain, the not quite one thing or another in a world (and literary world) ever so fond of the binary.

At it’s most basic, Color Me In is a novel about relationships, and despite the numerous amount of characters I found myself easily keeping track of everyone involved.  When we meet Nevaeh at the beginning of the novel, she hasn’t  begun to see her self as anyone quite yet, causing her the relationships she’s a part of to be…tumultuous to say the least.   It took me a beat to remember that, well, I haven’t read YA in awhile and that actually, a lot of Nevaeh’s behavior and the times that she tripped up or made a mistake actually made a lot of sense because she’s in a time in adolescence where everything is in flux, and on top of that her family life is a bit of a disaster.  I can firmly conclude that I am impressed with Diaz’s ability to nail down the teenage existence so accurately with Nevaeh’s character (and her peers in the novel) in a way that wasn’t as trite as other YA’s have felt to me these days.  Overall, I was impressed by Diaz’s balance between focusing on Naveah’s more internal relationships (with her family) versus her external relationships (with peers) and how her experiences with both informed how she acted with the other.

There were two aspects of this novel that felt a little, confusing to say the least.  For one thing, the main antagonist of the novel, Abby, is classic “high school royalty”.  Abby successfully bullies Nevaeh throughout the novel by dramatically making cruel, and often racist remarks to her face.  While in my experience most high school bullying, contrary what Hollywood has to say, shows up far more often with gossip and talking behind people’s backs, I make no effort to discredit the experiences displayed in this novel.  It was rather the strange power Abby, as a sophomore, seemed to have over Neveah’s school, combined with her complicated relationship with Nevaeh throughout the book (at one point they hang out??) that gave me pause.  The second aspect that I continue to wrestle with is Nevaeh’s relationship with her father, but more importantly, the ways that his character acts throughout the novel.  When we first meet Nevaeh, her parents freshly separated, she mourns a memory of a family bar-b-que.  Later in the novel, she references again and again moments from her childhood where her father had been fun, loving, and considerate.  However, despite these references to a good, albeit imperfect man of the past, the father that Nevaeh has in Color Me In is incredibly selfish, ignorant to his daughter’s life and feelings, and all around hard to read about.  This is not to say that characters can’t go through massive changes, but my issue with Nevaeh’s father was that the reader isn’t privy to these changes, or why.

All in all, I think that Color Me In will appeal best to a younger/middle YA audience.  Told in a modern and utterly relevant manner, Natasha Diaz’s debut isn’t one to miss.