When someone from the publisher reached out about Kaleidoscope, this line caught me: “This book is heart-wrenching and hopeful and the characters truly shine on the page. It’s one of those books where I wish I could read it again for the first time all over again. And I’m so happy that you get to.”
And I downloaded a copy almost immediately, but of course sat on it for a few months, allowing me to forget about the blurb and the subject and go into this completely blind.* This approach, if you’ve followed me for a while, sometimes works for me and sometimes it doesn’t. This time it sort of worked mostly because the intro was a little abrupt and different from the rest of the story, but that’s on me, not the author.
If I’m 100% honest I first was drawn to this book because of the cover art, a cropped 
So I have talked about gut punches when reading books before, but Silvera took it to a different level with this one—and this was his freakin’ debut novel!
What a difference eight-ish years makes between reads. I last read this in 
I’m not a big reading of poetry person. I just never have been, but as I’ve been trying to read more nonfiction and things that aren’t my norm (HA! right), when the publisher reached out it was a great opportunity to say yes.*