Brianna Peppins

Briar Cliff prep is a historically black boarding school. It’s a prep school that leads out to HBCUs. For our main character, she has looked forward to her time at Briarcliff all her life. It’s a family tradition and she’s going to meet her sister there. Her sister is on her last year and is ready to graduate. But not everything is fun and exciting at Briarcliff. You see her sister is in an abusive relationship. Avielle watches her sister, seeing the signs of abuse. Seeing the signs of violence. Trying to understand why her sister stays in abusive relationship. This book really gets into the feels. It starts out really slowly, but I did enjoy the look at an HBBS. Because the conversations they had on the things that they get to study or look into if things are banned incurrent society in certain states like Florida. So that made this book. Interesting enough to keep turning the pages. I won’t lie the only reason I finished the book was to see if the sister lived. That is the entire really long reason to finish a book, but it is a story of domestic violence. I’m not going to tell you if it if she lives, but one of the things this book does extremely well is the aftermath. The aftermath of a girl saying he’s abusive. This book gets into the sisters arguing over why the abuse sister doesn’t want to make it public. She says it won’t matter what he did it’ll be how classmates see it. She will be a lesser person for being abused and he’ll maintain his status quo, even though he’s an abuser. And she’s right! We see how modern teenage lives play out on social media and how an accusation like this would absolutely play out in a high school. There are not enough YA books that talk about domestic violence in high school, but we know what happened. I found this book was real. There are some a little out there events, but the real way things were happened, the real conversations of why you don’t leave, or how hard it is to leave, the real thoughts of a sister going why is my older sister staying? Why is why does this person stay with their abuser? Very real and at the end the book was worth it! One just has to get through a lot of prep, and a lot of beauty pageant talk in the beginning.… (meer)