You Should See Me in a Crown

You Should Me Me in a Crown has such a joyful cover and it sure did live up to it. Liz’s high school is prom obsessed, like the whole school works towards this one thing. There are rankings, community service and a recreation of a drink driving accident, complete with gory make-up and prom dresses. It’s a riot! They have their own social media app and Liz’s friends formulate an algorithm to work out where she stands in the rankings. She’s hardly the frontrunner, but slowly she starts to win people round by being herself.

Meanwhile, she meets the new girl in town and instantly crushes on her. Mack is also running for Prom Court but Liz can’t help but fall for her. The problem is, Liz isn’t out yet, and being queer could seriously harm her chances.

Liz might not be the biggest fan of the whole prom scene at the start, but I think she starts to fall for its magic too, at the same time that the rest of the kids come round to the idea that the King and Queen don’t need to be the usual suspects, from the usual families.

I liked that the majority of characters were good kids, so easily these books fall into tropes where it’s the protagonist against the world. Yes, there is one in particular who is mean and deserves to be the villain, but for the most part, it left me with warm fuzzy feelings for the whole thing.

It’s also the first time I’ve read a novel with a character with sickle cell disease, a hereditary disease mostly affecting those with African ancestry. It’s something I remember learning about at school, but since then I have never really heard about it. I think it’s great that these things are included in books which are otherwise fun, as it raises awareness when we might not feel like a reading a book that focuses on illness. It is a serious condition, as highlighted by the early death of Liz’s mother, but is also manageable as shown through her brother.

Liz feels a lot of responsibility towards her brother and her grandparents, who have given up a lot to look after them. She doesn’t want to burden them with the cost of her education and she feels it’s her job to look after her brother. It’s a lot to shoulder at a time in her life when she should be having fun. As often with these stories, a lot could be solved by just being honest but overall I found it a fantastic, escapist read.

First posted at Curiosity Killed the Bookworm.

YOU SHOULD SEE ME IN A CROWN is about a Black bi girl in small-town Indiana who needs to win Prom Queen in order to secure her scholarly dreams. With excellent characterization, a ticking clock which felt like noting time instead of playing up the deadline, and tender portrayals of platonic and romantic relationships, don't miss this one.

The way the timeline was handled was nice, since each section was a whole week it was a good reminder of how much time was left, but without feeling rushed. The MC has a lot of stuff to get done, but the days will take however long they take. Her relationships with her family conveyed a lot of depth even though the story was very focused on what was happening at school. I got a sense of their dynamic and it was nice. Her friendships in general are well-developed, with several of them changing (not always for the better) as the tension of the competition brought some things to light that had languished for far too long. 

I love the way the MC's relationship with her male best friend is handled. She's unafraid (especially later on) to say she loves him when describing her feelings about him. That's especially important when she's bi and it could so easily have been set up as "will she date a guy or a girl". Some of the bigoted reactions to her being bi do have that connotation, trying to set her up with him even though she already has a girl she likes, but the MC's view of their relationship is very clear. She likes him, loves him even, and is not trying to date him. The actual sapphic romance is sweet and earnest, with some really great moments and a lot of work put in later in the book to fix some broken communication from earlier on. It's realistically messy without being overwhelmingly stressful, and I love how it turns out. 

I was worried that her brother's illness (sickle cell) would be used as a plot device to derail her and that is Not what happens. He's just her younger brother who's living as best he can, and while it does affect him (and sometimes her) in the book it didn't feel like his illness was used for dramatic tension. I'm not qualified to speak on its nuances as disability rep, but at the very least it didn't seem like a gimmick to me.

As a Midwesterner I loved this portrayal of high school in the Midwest. I'm not from Indiana but there are enough similarities to my former Ohio home for this to feel very familiar. If you're also Midwestern a lot of this will probably spark recognition. If you're not Midwestern, yes it's really like this, especially outside of the scattered big cities. If anything, it could have held even more mentions of cornfields and still been spot on. The world-building is great, every new detail fit in to build this picture of a place I know well, and I think it was done in a way that would convey a sense of it to someone unfamiliar with this setting. Yes, I'm including the racism and queerphobia when I say it felt familiar, familiar isn't always nice.