American Street follows our main character, Fabiola, a Haitian native and her journey to America. But during their journey, Fabiola's mother is detained in New Jersey and Fabiola has to survive the streets of Detroit, her loud cousins, Chantal, Donna and Princess, and her new love interest. Desperate to take her mother out of detainment, Fab realizes that freedom comes with a price. 

I'm torn. I am absolutely torn. 

American Street is mine and Johely's Book Club pick for this month (February) and I'm so glad Johely picked this book for us to read. 

I'm always on the lookout for diverse books and this was perfect for Black History Month.

I cannot say how accurate this is with Haitian culture because I'm not Haitian and I'm not too familiar with the culture, but by the author's note at the end and the reviews I've read from people who are Haitian, I hear she does a great job portraying the lwa and spiritual guides.

Which, by the way, I found that element so interesting. I had never heard the stereotype of "Haitians do voodoo" or any of these spiritual guides and I definitely wanted to dive more into this new piece of information (to me). I love how throughout the novel, you learn about new guides as she starts to relate every person she is surrounded with: her cousins, aunt, the "crazy guy on the street" and even her love interest, Kasim to a spiritual guide. 

Character-wise, I fell in love with each of the characters especially Fab, from the first page. 

Seeing Fabiola try and figure out this new American culture is absolutely adorable but also hilarious. During Thanksgiving when her aunt Matant Jo asked her to cook the Thanksgiving meal because she wasn't feeling well, and Fab ended up cooking the food, Haitian style instead of American made me laugh so hard. The confusion from her cousins and aunt because she cut the turkey and fried it in sauce and used the sweet potato from the pie and made it into soup was hilariously cute.

And as her cousins are teaching her to talk "street" but Fabiola still has a Haitian accent, the words end up sounding weird, so they laugh, I can definitely relate to this with my parents as it's so funny but cute to hear people whith accents say something in English. 

I found that although Fabiola is our main character and she ties a lot of seriousness to this novel, she also adds a lot of comic relief which I love. 

Her cousins were also great characters, although I seemed to love Chantal the most. 

Kasim was also one of my favourite characters throughout the book because of how genuine he is: a normal kid who doesn't want to be on the streets but is because of his long-time best friend Dray. Which by the way, I absolutely hated Dray. the way he treated Fab's cousin Donna (whom he was dating) as he constantly hit her. Drove me insane. Although, his death I still found very sad. Not as sad as Kasim's which I bawled my eyes for; trust me. Ask Johely or my boyfriend. I cried like there was no tomorrow. 

But the most heart-wrenching thing about Kasim's death, is that Fabiola accidentally planned Kasim's death. Before you say it, no, she did not try to kill her boyfriend. She tried to get Dray in jail and in resulted in Fabiola's boyfriend getting killed. It broke my heart. Mainly because we didn't see it coming.

Ever since Kasim met Fab and their relationship blossomed from there, I loved them together. There were so many squeals and chants that I could only hear because I wanted them to get a happily ever after and I thought they did.. until I hit the last 50 pages and it hit me.

Ibi Zoboi's writing is absolutely phenomenal in this debut novel, which I was surprised this even was a debut. Her writing flowed so well and it was so hard for me to put down this book. One night I stayed up until almost 4am reading this book, until my eyes couldn't take it anymore and I passed out. It grips you from the beginning and it doesn't let go until the end. It has been a while since I've read a book like that before.

The only thing I found partially useless were they backstories because majority of them weren't really adding to the plot. I feel like the stories near the end like 8800 American Street's was because he talked about how there was always death in the house which at the time, I thought it was asking about Fab's Uncle Phil who was shot in the head.. until we find out he wasn't shot in the home (Then I realized it was foreshadowing to Dray's death in the home later in the book) I also thought Dray's story was very useful to the plot as his girlfriend and her sisters thought their dad was killed to protect Dray's Uncle Q. But really, Dray accidentally killed Uncle Phil and that blew my mind. 

Stories like Matant Jo and Pri's, I wish had a similar style. I was hoping the stories were there to expose information to the reader than the main character doesn't know and at first it didn't but near the end, it got better. 

I am absolutely in love with this book. It made me feel angry, happy, sad. It made me laugh so hard I couldn't breathe but it also made me sob.

I absolutely loved American Street and I definitely see myself re-reading it in the future.