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A fantastic end to the Dear Martin trilogy.

In this third and final installment, the main character of Jared Christensen is writing letters to his best friend Manny who died in the book Dear Martin. Jared was an insufferable and racist tool in Dear Martin but now that he’s in college (at Yale, though that is not ever explicitly stated in this book, there are clues for the reader to know this) and has experienced the death of his best friend as the result of racial profiling, Jared is trying to be a better human. Sometimes he gets it right, but many times he still gets it very wrong.

Nic Stone is an absolute gift to humanity and to the young people for whom she writes. Giving someone like Jared Christensen the grace we as readers feel he likely doesn’t deserve is how we learn to navigate a world where our digital silos have trained us to see people as either all good or all bad. Jared’s story reminds us that we all contain multitudes� especially as many of us (speaking for myself as a white person) are working to unlearn the racism (both overt and covert, systematic and individual) we have been taught in our homes and by society at large.

I’m grateful that Nic Stone and many of the POC characters gave Jared the grace he didn’t deserve, but I hope that white readers don’t assume that everyone will react this way and they use this book as an opportunity to see that there is always work to do. Jared didn’t have an epiphany after his friend died and then just automatically become a benevolent anti-racist hero. He was still messing up even to the last pages. Like we all do in real life.