Blackout by Dhonielle Clayton, Tiffany D. Jackson, Nic Stone, Angie Thomas, Ashley Woodfolk, Nicola Yoon

One of the prompts in the Pop Sugar Reading Challenge this year is a book of interconnected short stories. Blackout is a book like that! Yay! It's written by Dhonielle Clayton, Tiffany D. Jackson, Nic Stone, Angie Thomas, Ashley Woodfolk, and Nicola Yoon. I listened to the audiobook narrated by  Joniece Abbott-Pratt, Dion Graham, Imani Parks, Jordan Cobb, Shayna Small, A.J. Beckles, and Bahni Turpin. 

During the pandemic in 2020, six of the best YA novelists, all women of color, got together and created this lovely anthology about what could happen to young people in a blackout in New York City. Tiffany D. Jackson writes a story called "The Long Walk" that tells the story of Tammi and Kareem as they try to make it from Harlem to Bed-Stuy without the benefit of money or public transit. Meanwhile, the other writers write stories about characters who we are introduced to in "The Long Walk." 

As with other anthologies, some of these stories are stronger than others. "Mask Off" by Nic Stone was a particular favorite of mine, about a basketball player who runs into a boy from his school on the same subway train as the darkness falls. I was kind of disappointed in the end of "No Sleep 'til Brooklyn" by Angie Thomas, but I will let you make your own call about that if you read it.

Look, I am absolutely not the right audience for teen angst anymore. I have mostly sworn off YA because being a teen in 2025 is different in a million ways from being a teen in the 1990s and I just do not understand it and it makes me feel ancient. It also makes me feel ancient when I think about how all the drama from this night will not matter to those kids in a decade, but it does matter to them, quite a bit, on that night, and the fact that they have no perspective is super frustrating for me. BUT. I was a teen once I do remember how everything seemed So Big and So Important and how I could not control my hormones at all. 

But, despite this, I really enjoyed this audiobook. I felt like the narrators did an excellent job and I was super excited to be in New York on a boiling summer day with no electricity. Thumbs up. 4.5/5 stars

Lines of note:

...sitting between a giant tower of toilet paper rolls and one of those big yellow rolling mop buckets full of water the color of gargoyle snot. (Mask Off)

Gargoyle snot!! This description made me howl. 

Finding love is as rare as finding identical snowflakes. (All the Great Love Stories...And Dust)

To be young again. 

When I was a little girl, Gran would take me here and we'd greet each one and she'd whisper that the pair of lions, Patience and Fortitude, protected all the library books from harm. I'd stare up at my smug grandmother always asking her why anyone would want to hurt books and she'd wink and then remind me that the stories we tell can be dangerous. (All the Great Love Stories...And Dust)

To all of us in the United States who rely on libraries, please consider calling your Congressional reps and telling them how important your public and/or university library is to your life. 

I miss the days when all it took was an ice cream cone to fix everything. There's not enough ice cream in the world for all I'm dealing with. (No Sleep 'til Brooklyn)

Right? Our local ice cream place opened last month and I did go there for an ice cream cone on a day when it was pouring rain in the 40s. It did make me feel a little bit better. 

Kareem always made up little games for our long walks. One day we were spotting all the brownstones that had red doors. The next we were playing Count the Gentrifiers. (The Long Walk, Act 5)

I just wrote about how much I liked red doors and then I felt incredibly called out by this book! #obviouslyawhitelady

Hat mentions (why hats?):

...wearing a hat pulled down low over his forehead...took his hat off...(Mask Off)