Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the eARC. This book will release from CLASH Books on February 25, 2025 in the US. However, I stopped reading at 17% due to concerns about the author, a white writer, voicing a Korean American character. 

In All Our Tomorrows, Amy DeBellis dissects millennial and Gen Z culture through the lives of three young women navigating the complex realities of New York City in a near-future, hyper-capitalist world. Janet, an overworked online therapist; Anna, a retail worker and sugar baby seeking financial survival; and Gemma, a college student turned aspiring influencer, each confront their struggles with nihilism, isolation, and climate anxiety. DeBellis employs sharp critiques and dark humor to explore the intimate challenges of identity, privilege, and resilience in an era defined by economic instability and digital culture.

I stopped reading All Our Tomorrows at 17% because Amy DeBellis’s portrayal of Janet, a Korean American character, felt misaligned with my values around racial justice and representation. As a white author, DeBellis’s decision to voice a character with a specific racialized experience raised concerns about appropriation, particularly because Janet’s ethnicity seemed incidental to the story rather than thoughtfully integrated.  

Janet’s ethnicity is revealed in a scene where her date, a tone-deaf white man, exotifies her background by asking where she’s *really* from, “like ancestrally.” While DeBellis’s critique of white privilege and microaggressions is evident, the scene risks reducing Janet’s racial identity to a narrative device for advancing this critique. If her ethnicity plays no significant role beyond this scene, it feels tokenizing and exploitative. If it reappears later, the risk grows that it could be mishandled in ways that amplify the problematic nature of this choice.  

While I appreciate DeBellis’s incisive commentary on millennial struggles, her approach to Janet’s character felt at odds with my values. I’m not comfortable supporting a narrative that might perpetuate the very erasure or commodification of marginalized voices it aims to critique, particularly when those voices could be more authentically written by someone with lived experience.