BOOK REVIEW: Full Disclosure

Full Disclosure by Camryn Garrett
Publication Date: October 29, 2019

Bringing you a review for a backlist title that I recently read!

TW: forced outing (HIV), racism (challenged), bullying

WHAT I LIKED:

• When we start the novel, we are thrown into the story! It’s less than 300 pages so we got to get going!!
• Miles (the love interest) is SO CUTE! Simone and him have such fun interactions and he just seems like the perfect YA love interest
  • I was LOLing and smiling at like half of their interactions
  • I’m putting a spoiler in white bc I have to talk about it: The scene where her and Miles are throwing condoms at each other is legit one of the funniest scenes I have read in a hot second. When her dads AND friends walk in on them and she has a condom in her HAIR? I died
• Simone’s family!
  • She has two dads who are super cute and I loved seeing her relationship with them grow and change
• Seeing Simone grow
  • She makes a ton of stupid mistakes, but she is a teenager figuring things out with the added pressure of being a black girl with HIV
• I loved seeing her HIV group and how those relationships changed
• This is very sex positive. Simone and her friends are always talking about sex
• The HIV representation. I’ve read books about HIV, but they have all been historical. I learned so much about what it means to have HIV in today’s world
• The complex female friendships
  • They fight, but I loved their dynamic
  • Also, one of her friends is asexual and the other is bisexual so yay for representation!The #OwnVoices black girl representation, Simone has some great quotes about what it means to be black
• All the musical references!!
• Simone is directing Rent and is constantly talking about musicals
  • Miles and her have some super cute banter about musicals
• There is also a side plot about questioning your sexuality which is done so well!
• I am not sure how this novel covers so much in such a short book, but the reader truly sees Simone and her relationships grow
• I LOVE THE TITLE
• Honestly I will not get over how much I learned about HIV reading this book. Should I have known most of this already? Probably. But, I am glad a book like this exists so people can learn!!

Honestly, I could keep talking about things I liked about this novel. I wish I saw more people hyping this one up because it is a fantasic diverse contemporary

WHAT I DID NOT LIKE:

• I wish we had seen more with her family and some expansion with their dynamics. This book is less than 300 pages and it would have been nice if it was a bit longer
  • Specifically I would have liked to see more with her brother Dave. He has a great quote which I’m not going to mention bc spoilers, but I wanted to see more of Simone’s complex relationship with him. It would be so cool if we could get a spin off book on him

Overall, I am so glad I picked this one up on a whim for my YA fiction class. I read it so quickly and can’t wait to see what Garrett writes next. I highly recommend this novel if you like YA contemporary with a side of social issues and plenty of LGBT+ representation.

 4.5/5 stars

xoxo, Tree