The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo

I have heard so much about this book over the last few months/years and I finally was able to check it out on audiobook. I really, really enjoyed listening to this. I felt like Elizabeth Acevedo was a fantastic narrator for her own work (she is apparently a slam poet in her own right, in addition to writing about a character who is one) and I loved the main character of Xiomara and her ability to write her story through poetry. I honestly got choked up listening to some of her poems, thinking about how hard it is to be a teenager sometimes, and I couldn't even stand the emotions that I got while listening to some of her poems--particularly the one about what men and boys say to her. I thought Xiomara and her family were such interesting characters, and the tension between Xiomara and her mother over religion and her mother's expectations was so believable. My only real complaint was that I felt like all of the tension and the problems in the climax of the book were resolved way too easily. Her mom has been a holy terror through the whole book, and then all of a sudden she can let go of her overbearing overly religious issues and let Xiomara have her boyfriend over? I can't imagine that she would transform that much, even while talking to their priest. I was pretty disappointed in the neatly-wrapped-in-a-bow ending, because it didn't seem to go along with the rest of the book. But the poetry and the character development throughout the book was fantastic, and definitely worth it. A very good option for an audiobook as well.