Salt the Water by Candice Iloh

Salt the Water by Candice Iloh

The rundown: Cerulean is free everywhere except school, where they’re known for challenging authority. Raised in a free-spirited home where they are encouraged to be their full self, they dream of moving cross-country to live off the grid after graduation. After a fight with a teacher, Cerulean impulsively drops out. But Cerulean’s sheltered upbringing hasn’t prepared them for the consequences of their choice. 


The review: I was immediately drawn to this book when a friend shared it with me, both in terms of content and structure (it’s a short novel in verse). Salt is about how the education system not only fails but actively harms students like Cerulean, who is black and nonbinary. Students who live a non-normative existence some way. Students who don’t passively accept the institutionalized power dynamics of student-teacher relationships. Students who have no desire to be funneled ever deeper into systems that hate them. Students who don’t learn in a traditional academic setting. And I appreciated Iloh’s choice to make the (truly terrible, no good, very bad) teacher with whom Cerulean gets into an argument a Teach for America teacher. It adds an additional layer of nuance to the story that the person who is supposedly highly trained and has supposedly made a commitment to an organization whose stated mission is to strengthen educational equity. 


Goes well with: Check out What She Missed by Liara Tamani or perhaps Leah Johnson’s You Should See Me in a Crown.