Zyla and Kai Review

A fresh new YA romance novel by Kristina Forest, Zyla & Kai is an epic star-crossed love story about first love and not just the will they, won’t they— but why can’t they?

While on a school trip to the Poconos Mountains (in the middle of a storm) high school seniors, Zyla Matthews and Kai Johnson, run away together leaving their friends and family confused. As far as everyone knows, Zyla and Kai have been broken up for months. And honestly? Their break up hadn’t surprised anyone. Zyla and Kai met while working together at an amusement park the previous summer, and they couldn’t have been more different.

Zyla was a cynic about love. She’d witnessed the dissolution of her parents’ marriage early in life, and it left an indelible impression. Her only aim was graduating and going to fashion school abroad. Until she met Kai.

Kai was a serial monogamist and a hopeless romantic. He’d put a temporary pause on his dating life before senior year to focus on school and getting into his dream HBCU. Until he met Zyla.

Alternating between the past and present, we see the love story unfold from Zyla and Kai’s perspectives: how they first became the unlikeliest of friends over the summer, how they fell in love during the school year, and why they ultimately broke up… Or did they?

Romantic, heart-stirring and a little mysterious, Zyla & Kai will keep readers guessing until the last chapter.

General Impressions

This is a contemporary YA to be devoured and nothing less.

"Zyla and Kai" is a romance between two black teens, written by a black author where race is not at the centre but it certainly isn't discounted either. The focus of the book though is on the love story and it was a delight to see these two people falling in love, communicating and trusting each other through the drama in their lives and all the reasons and people trying to keep them apart.

Zyla and Kai could not be more different, one a cynic, the other a romantic, one used to struggling economically and a family that although loving, put too much on her shoulders, the other struggling with grief and his mental well-being, both struggling under the pressures and uncertainty of what comes next and how to balance their ambitions with their happiness.

It was such a pleasure witnessing these two people not only getting to know each other and falling in love but more importantly, respecting each other's experiences, trying to put themselves in each other's place and communicate their insecurities and support each other without forgetting their own importance. I've read adult romances with less depth and maturity in the way relationships were handled and I'm so glad for all the teens learning that healthy relationships are about more than physical attraction and intense feelings - respect, communication, and understanding are just if not more important.

My favourite part of this book was that Kai was both an outgoing person and a supportive friend and boyfriend without having his trauma and insecurities discounted because he was a young man. It was beautiful and so comforting to see his feelings being taken seriously, seeing a young black man being given a space to talk about what he was feeling and worrying about without equaling that to weakness.

The only fault I found in this book was that the parents/guardians were forgiven too quickly, their faults brushed under the rug, in the name of forgiveness and a happy ending. That happens all too frequently on YA where parents are either so bad they are not present at all and provide no support or because these books are written by adults who often have children themselves or were raised to see children and young adults as people to be controlled and their experiences discounted due to their youth, endorse a narrative where parents by the virtue of birthing/raising someone are exempt of being called to task for all their toxicity and shortcomings as people and parents.

While one of the most deeply emotional parts of this book was seeing Zyla and Kai addressing their shortcomings and working on them, the parents, particularly, Zyla's who get to decide when to be strict and when to completely ignore their kids in the pursuit of doomed relationships, letting Zyla parent her younger sister, study, work and be their emotional support, get away with a half-assed apology or a "sorry you felt that way, but I won't apologize for all the ways I traumatized you for almost two decades, just get over it and be thankful I fed you". It's time we get over the myth that a parent's love is unconditional and the reason to ignore and/or forgive everything they have done - experience counts but they don't know everything and they should apologize and make amends for their mistakes too.

Kristina Forest deserves praise for so many things in this book but something else that deeply moved me was the multitude of romantic and loving relationships: from different kinds of literary tropes, monogamy, straight, queer, poly, friendship...there were so many different kinds of love in this book and none of them was seen as the right one, only the right one for a character at that moment. I also loved that we had queer teens and adults present throughout the entire book without any kind of explanation as to why they were worthy or deserved to be there. The secondary characters are as complex as the main pairing - they were not there to support the mc's journey, but on journeys of their own and I would read books about each and every one of them, that's how talented this author is.

Conclusion

This was such a necessary well-accomplished book and I would love to see this adapted.

Thank you to Little Brown Group and Atom for this proof.

Rating: 4/5