Review: Blackout by Dhonielle Clayton, Tiffany D. Jackson, Nic Stone, Angie Thomas, Ashley Woodfolk, and Nicola Yoon

Blackout is a collection of connected short stories by six Black authors focusing on Black love stories in NYC during a blackout. Each of the six authors writes a short story focusing on a popular romance trope in a highly interconnected set of short stories.

The origin story of this is that Dhonielle Clayton assembled five other Black women to write love stories about Black teens because she watched Let it Snow with her niece, and her niece asked why there aren't cute fluffy love stories about Black girls. The book does an excellent job of achieving the goal of writing love stories about Black teens. It is a delightful fluffy soapy time.

Here is the title of each story with their author and connected trope
The Long Walk by Tiffany D. Jackson - exes to lovers
Mask Off by Nic Stone - secret crush
Made to Fitt by Ashley Woodfolk - instalove
All the Great Love Stories... and Dust by Dhonelle Clayton - childhood friends to lovers
No Sleep Till Brooklyn by Angie Thomas - love triangle
Seymour and Grace by Nicola Yoon - enemies to lovers (sorta), forced proximity

I am going to give my quick opinions on each story then talk about the novel as a whole; it felt wrong to just talk about the stories individually because of the interconnected nature of this book.

"The Long Walk" was one of my favorites, tied for second; I really loved the five-act structure employed for this story. I particularly loved the first and last segment of this story. Every other 'chapter' of this book is one of the acts of this particular story. I loved the sense of action and forward motion that came with the pair in this story walking from Manhattan to Brooklyn. I don't want to go into specifics for each individual story because I don't want to spoil anything because they are all short stories.

I particularly liked how this story illustrated being introspective and seeing not only where someone else hurt you but where you hurt someone else. It was very fun to read exes to lovers story. I really need to read more Tiffany D. Jackson soon!

"Mask Off" is the first queer story in this book. It had a really cute ending and was able to play with time in a way that was interesting to see. I liked the message about embracing who you are but did find some of the lessons in this one a little more overt than seemed natural; I am not sure how many teens have really strong opinions about breastfeeding in public. This was one of the stories I really wanted to read more from. Which I guess just means that I need to catch up on Nic Stone novels.

"Made to Fit" was another story that I really wanted more from. It is a fun sapphic love story that had a therapy dog, a retirement home, and essentially a scavenger hunt. This story was very quick and sweet but felt a bit repetitive due to the direct parallels being drawn in such a short space. I am sure this will be some folk's favorite story, but it didn't hit perfectly for me.

"All the Great Love Stories... and Dust" is set in the New York Public Library. It centers a bet that I did not understand at all but incorporates footnotes in a fun way.

"No Sleep Till Brooklyn" was the other story tied for second for me! I thought this one was quite cute, and I particularly liked the ending. This book nicely diverged from the trope. I also really just thought some of this story was funny, and I really liked the way Thomas talked about being a tourist and savoring the experience of being somewhere different from your home.

"Seymour and Grace" was my favorite of the stories! I loved the way Yoon wrote the pair's initial dislike and the evolution into hopeful attraction. I particularly loved the banter in this story. Yoon also excellently handled wrapping up the novel with cute cameos from each story incorporated very smoothly.

I chose to give this book 4 stars because I always believe in rounding up, and when I averaged my individual stories out, I got closer to a 4 than a 3, but there are a few elements of the book overall that made this decision a bit odd. I do think that this book clearly achieved its goal; these are six fluffy love stories about Black teens, so the book is obviously a success. I just found the overall tone and themes, and lessons to be a bit repetitive. I think because it was all very interconnected, the points of similarity became hard to ignore.

The similarities seemed to be that all the stories packed so much into them that it was a little hard for the main characters to have room to shine as brightly as I wanted them to. Most of the adults in this book (except the Karen teacher in Angie Thomas' story) are very sage and just swoop in to teach a lesson and then swoop out. The central theme of most of the stories was acceptance of yourself, and they mostly had pretty overt lessons that repeated in almost every story. I love so many of these authors I wanted to have a greater variation in tone. If you removed all the author's names from the stories, you would be able to match the correct author to the correct story, but I don't think this was enough to alleviate my issue.

I did really like that this book was cozy and dreamy and sweet. I just wanted more time to develop each story, a lot was packed into 250ish pages, and I ended three of the six stories feeling like I really wanted more to the story to feel a sense of completion. I am sure there will be folks who don't find this story at all repetitive, totally not trying to assert my opinion as fact. I do think this book did what it intended to do, and it is obviously something that is very needed. We need more stories about Black children and adults that don't center trauma; this was an excellent display of all the fluffy romance tropes that white kids get to see themselves in all the time.

The structure of this book is really well done. All the stories are connected, sometimes the main characters in two different stories are siblings or best friends, or maybe the person you see on the street in one story is the main character in the next. It was all done very smoothly and did certainly read as one overarching story with multiple narratives contained within.

I gave this book 4 stars on Goodreads and The StoryGraph. I would certainly recommend this story to folks who love love stories, to readers who want more joyful Black stories, and to people that love displays of multiple authors in one book!