when I first started to read the book poet x I thought that the book was honestly going to be extremely cliche but as the book continues I did not realise that I was going to fall in love with Xiomara's personality. this may be because I see similar traits between me and her. for example, we both aren't religious people and our mothers are. we both have different opinions on what we want to do in the future which our families strongly disagree. we both also have EXTREMELY religious friends( which at times does get annoying even though they are only looking out for us).
I also did not realise how much I enjoyed reading this book until I started noticing that I am reading 30-40 even 50 pages a day which never happenes as I have a really short attention span and also have a tendency of finding non-fiction books truly boring.
I feel that the book poet X is a book that a lot of older teenagers would find interesting as well as intriguing( year 10 and year 11s). This is because the Xiomara talks about her home life and her love life, which I believe is something that all teens should know about. Her home life is far from perfect and that reassures teens that stuff like this goes on and that it is okay to fall in love, it is okay to have a brother that is part of the LGBT+ community. It's okay to branch off from your parents' expectations of how you should live your life and find out who you are.
The reason why I believe that this is a book good for older teens to read is because of the maturity level that is needed in this book. I feel as if younger years wouldn't understand much that is going on with the author's life and generally won't understand why poetry is really important to X. This may be because of the stigma behind poetry or maybe because of their preferences, but overall I believe that this book is better for older kids. this book also has explicit content that younger kids would just giggle at.
the part I enjoyed most about the book was the relationship Xio had with her mother. now I know it sounds a bit weird for me to say that as they had a very unenthusiastic relationship but I loved how the author just did not sugar coat it at all. The author was completely honest even when it came to the brutal moment where her mum slapped her and did some eerie religious thing with rice( still do not understand what the mum was trying to get at with using rice). This yet again showed reality. not all families are perfect. in fact, what is the perfect family? it just does not exist and this book shows that through poetry, which is kinda cool not gonna lie.
However, the part that I did not enjoy was how cold Xiomara was to Aman. all he wanted from her was for her to read her poetry from her, not for her to get nervous and keep thinking that her poetry being 'not good enough' for him. I also did not like when they had first met in their biology class. And his elbow had brushed her elbow and all of a sudden they fell in love. I mean if that's how you fall in love then carry on but personally, that was way way way too weird and kinda cringy for me.
Overall I would rate this book a good 9.75 out of 10 as I appreciated reading this book.

YOU ARE READING
📍 new destination(s)
FanfictionA story in which a stripper meets a determined boy through a hooking website . . . that's it 📌