Liz Between The Lines

I first encountered Joy Watson’s writing in her debut novel The Other Me . I’m hardly one to read young adult fiction, particularly due to my protest against attributing a character’s choices to their juvenile minds. On the other hand, an author’s own wiser thoughts can leak out of the younger character with a level of maturity I struggle to believe an 8 year old would possess or articulate in that manner. Nevertheless, The Other Me held a perfect balance between my two conflicts with a level of realness that kept me captivated all the way to five stars at the end and cemented Joy as an auto-read author in my books.   Because I love you similarly impressed me from the first line: “ This is not a book about breakups. It’s a book about erasure. About the quiet violence that can live inside love, the kind that doesn’t leave bruises on your skin but rewires the architecture of your mind. ” The nonfiction anthology shares the stories of three women, Zara, Mira and Thuli, whose lives ar...