Forgive Me Not

• Author: Jennifer Baker
• Genre: YA General Fiction
• Publication Date: August 15, 2023
• Publisher: Nancy Paulsen Books

Thank you to Nancy Paulsen Books and Lathea Mondesir for sending me an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

CONTENT WARNING: death of a child, incarceration, substance use, suicide attempt, grief, sexual assault

All it takes is one night and one bad decision for fifteen-year-old Violetta Chen-Samuels’s life to go off the rails. After driving drunk and causing the accident that kills her little sister, Violetta is incarcerated. Under the juvenile justice system, her fate lies in the hands of those she’s wronged—her family. With their forgiveness, she could go home. But without it? Well…

Denied their forgiveness, Violetta is now left with two options, neither good—remain in juvenile detention for an uncertain sentence or participate in the Trials. The Trials are no easy feat, but if she succeeds, she could regain both her freedom and what she wants most of all: her family’s love. In her quest to prove her remorse, Violetta is forced to confront not only her family’s grief, but her own—and the question of whether gaining their forgiveness is more important than forgiving herself.

As intensely haunting as it is captivating, Forgive Me Not is a searing indictment of the juvenile justice system, as one incarcerated teen weighs what she is willing to endure for forgiveness.

This is one of those books that magically appeared in my mailbox one day, and although I hadn’t heard of it before then, I read the synopsis and was immediately intrigued. And while I normally read my physical ARCs in order of release, I’ve been going through a bit of a pre-slump and decided to go rogue and grabbed this one. It was probably one of the best decisions I’ve made this month.

It wasn’t long ago that I read Chain-Gang All-Stars, and this book does for the YA crowd what that book did for the adult crowd. Both books force us to take a long, hard look at our broken justice system, explores the even longer distance we have to go to fix it, and envision two different ways in which efforts could go horribly wrong. 

Violetta Chen-Samuels is caught right in the middle of this broken system and the efforts to improve it. She’s a good kid from a good family, a freshman in high school, and an AP student. But all it took was one bad decision to wind up in juvenile detention waiting for a decision on which hinges the rest of her life: whether she is going upstate to prison, has to complete Trials, or will receive forgiveness and can return home. Her case is complicated by the fact that her family is torn because her parents are the victims deciding her fate as well since her crime was driving drunk and killing her sister in an accident. 

This book really made me think about the nature of crime and forgiveness. If someone commits a crime against us, how exactly do we decide what they have to do to earn our forgiveness? And as the book demonstrates, it doesn’t solve the problem of the justice system being stacked against Black and Brown people. The majority of the young women in juvenile detention read as POC, and there’s a scene where systemic racism comes into play between a white character and a mixed race character. 

We get to see the story from the POV of both Violetta and her brother Vincent. Initially, this seemed to be a strange choice to me, but I quickly realized that this allowed us to see how the family was affected by Violetta’s actions as well. And there was so much to see within the family—not just their grief over the loss of a child, but so many conflicting emotions about Violetta. Violetta’s parents were not just angry with her, but also worried about her welfare, and concerned about the care she was receiving in detention. 

This is the kind of book that makes you really think and will stay with you long after you read it. I couldn’t put it down and found myself reading until 4am because I had to see how things ended. There’s great representation, with both MCs being mixed-race, and their Black and Chinese heritage being equally represented in the story, and one of the MCs is queer. Additionally, it discusses pressures that teenagers face, including academic pressure, peer pressure, and the struggle to find oneself. Overall, this was fantastic, and beautifully written.