Hello and happy Sunday. How are you today? Are you ready for the week ahead? I feel like I didn’t get a proper weekend since I had to work yesterday, but oh well, such is life. I’m still going over books I read in December, and today I want to tell you about Good Kings Bad Kings by Susan Nussbaum.

We all know because I say it every other blog that I’m sort of done with romance, right? What I’m into now more than anything is the following: a slice-of-life piece of contemporary fiction that is character-based. Also, the characters aren’t all super likeable but that also makes them relatable. This is what I got with Good Kings Bad Kings. The main setting is an assisted living facility for teenagers with disabilities. We get to read from the POV of people who work there, people who live there, and other characters that are indirectly involved with the facility. Susan Nussbaum, the author, had a physical disability and was an activist, so she knew what she was writing about.

Something that bothered me, though, was that for some characters, especially a Latina and a Black character, who narrated in the first person, it was almost as if they were being mocked by the way they spoke. You know when authors write the way they imagine some people talk? Like, making grammatical errors or changing the spelling of words that are mispronounced? This is what the author did in this case. And she was neither Black not Latina, so I don’t understand her choice there. As much as I enjoyed the book, this was something that kept nagging at me and I feel that it’s necessary to mention.