Historically Inaccurate, by Shay Bravo
Goodreads ¦ Amazon
Series?: No
Publisher: Wattpad Books
Release Date: September 29, 2020
Length: 320 pages
Source: ARC
Format: Paperback
Times Read: Once

It only takes one moment to change your life forever…

After her mother’s deportation last year, all Soledad “Sol” Gutierrez wants is for her life to go back to normal. Everything’s changed―new apartment, new school, new family dynamic―and Sol desperately wants to fit in. When she joins her community college’s history club, it comes with an odd initiation process: break into Westray’s oldest house and steal . . . a fork?

There’s just one problem: while the owners of the house aren’t home, their grandson Ethan is, and when he catches Sol with her hand in the kitchen drawer, she barely escapes with the fork intact. This one chance encounter irrevocably alters her life, and Sol soon learns that sometimes fitting in isn’t as important as being yourself―even if that’s the hardest thing she’s ever had to do.

I was excited for the diversity and rep here, but…

-It was just not well done. And more than that, it was sort of harmful. One of the MCs is Black (which is a whole different topic, because the book takes it’s sweet time bringing that up. It was well over a hundred pages in before I caught mention), and when he states that he’s afraid that as a Black man, he might be arrested for what they are doing, if not shot and killed on sight, Sol completely dismisses him, brushing him off with a “I won’t let anything happen.”

-Ethan used he/him as the pronouns for Anna several times and it’s just…never discussed? The way they were so clearly used I assumed there was going to be some big reveal about the character later or some sort of explanation, but there was nothing. If this was supposed to a hint by the author that Anna is trans it’s INCREDIBLY problematic–misgendering someone is not the way to go about that.

-Sol is not an idiot. So why does she act like one about this club? The “history” club has NOTHING to do with history. It has nothing to do with anything and is a bizarre blend of eating food together and then being given illegal activities to do as “dares”.

Final Thoughts: Look guys I thought this was gonna be cool and then it just totally wasn’t. I found it really hurtful and potentially harmful, especially by an #ownvoices author.