Boundless: Twenty Voices Celebrating Multicultural and Multiracial Identities - Ismée Amiel Williams & Rebecca Balcárcel - ★★.½

EDITORS: Ismée Amiel Williams & Rebecca Balcárcel

GENRE: YA Anthology 

RATING: 2.5 stars

In a Nutshell: An anthology themed around the troubles of coming from multi-racial/multi-cultural origins. Great in terms of authentic rep. In terms of writing, well… it’s YA as advertised. So it will work better with the YA crowd.

This collection of twenty stories comes with an amazing theme. What happens when your identity crosses boundaries of race, culture, religion, or nationality? You are ‘boundless’; your identity cannot be contained within a single checkbox. Do you lean more towards one side of your parental ancestry? Can you keep one foot on each side of your cultural origin and do justice to both? Do your peers accept your holistic persona or see you only as you are visible to them, in terms of your facial features (or perhaps, I should say – racial features)?

Sounds like a relevant theme, right? In today’s world, where boundaries keep getting diluted and a “country” is nothing but a geo-political unit and citizens are more global than local, the number of people who come from multiracial and multicultural origins is at its peak. However, this doesn’t mean that they fit into their dual identities with ease, and the problem is as much because of their own split-personality feelings as because of others’ judgemental comments.

Each of the twenty stories in this collection features such a protagonist, and this should have hence led to a satisfying anthology experience. However, the hurdle I couldn’t jump over is the writing, which is adamantly YA in style. I was hoping that the powerful theme would be enough to push aside the shortcomings of the YA approach, but unfortunately, that doesn’t happen. Most of the main adult characters in the stories are either idiots or ignoramuses. The emotional exploration of the protagonists is primarily at a surface level. The characters are typical young adults who feel that they know more than adults.

The biggest disappointment was that the theme is addressed with justice only in a few of the stories. In most of the stories, the protagonist deals with YA problems rather than cultural-identity issues, with the latter being the background than the prime focus. This makes the collection feel like a generic YA anthology, and also makes the stories feel repetitive after a while.

All in all, this might work better for YA readers and for readers who are fond of YA-style writing. If you are an adult reader who wants to try an anthology about a set of teenagers who go through life mortified at the ignorance of their peers and the adults in their lives, this will work for you. But if you are a reader who has a low threshold of tolerance of flat and/or opinionated young characters, avoid it regardless of the outstanding theme.

I rated the stories individually as I always do, but after a point, every story began to get the same rating – between 2 to 3 stars, with just a couple of exceptions. So I am just going to hit the halfway mark here, and round it up wherever needed as I know a part of the displeasure is because of my inability to accept YA writing without rolling my eyes.

A shoutout to the cover designer - you did a wonderful job!

My thanks to Inkyard Press and NetGalley for the DRC of “Boundless: Twenty Voices Celebrating Multicultural and Multiracial Identities”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.