This book is brilliant and so timely - but don’t listen to me, I’m just some random white girl. Listen to Yomi Adegoke and Elizabeth Uviebinené and all the amazing black women interviewed for this book about growing up as a black girl in Britain today. Incredibly well researched, covering topics from education to dating, this really is a bible. I’m honoured to have been able to read it and be thoroughly educated on issues I don’t know enough about. It should be a handbook in every high school classroom.

(I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review)

I was so ready to learn how to “Slay in your lane”, but this took me by surprise. It reads more like a Sociology thesis.

“You’re black and you’re female, you have to try twice as hard as anyone else”

I guess the saying about not judging a book by its cover couldn’t be any more accurate for SIYL. Coated in bubblegum pink and scarlet red, with those beautiful and accomplished young black females plastered on the cover, I expected something more light-hearted and “fun”. Instead, the decisions I thought I (as a young black female) had made about my career path, interests & just about everything else, was challenged. I started to identify nuances in upbringing, socialisation, conversations...to do with race, gender, and class.

“We are tattooed with our otherness...hypervisible in predominantly white spaces”

I feel like I can see clearer now, and drop a line from SIYL in just about every policy conversation abou protected characteristics, differential attainment, access rights and issues for minority groups, etc.

I think SIYL achieved its goal of showing this black female that “there is no limit to the roles [I] can carve for [myself] in the world”. Thank you Yomi and Elizabeth

Another timely book that shouldn't be needed but is necessary. I thought it was brilliantly put together and endlessly fascinating. .