Like her earlier books, \u201cReggie and Delilah\u2019s Year of Falling\u201d is centered around a diverse cast of Long Beach teenagers. And, as with its predecessors, the book is likely to be a success. It\u2019s been selected as the Target YA Book Club pick for February and will be featured in stores nationwide. It also received a coveted starred review in Publishers Weekly.<\/p>\n Bryant, who lives in Long Beach with her husband and two young daughters, already feels like an enmeshed part of the city\u2019s artistic fabric. It\u2019s hard for her to believe that her NAACP Image Award-nominated debut came out just two years ago.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s gone fast. It\u2019s definitely gone fast,\u201d she said in a recent interview. \u201cEven though this is my third book, it was actually the first one I wrote after I had been published because I wrote the second book in that little bubble before the first was published. So the only voice I was hearing was my own. This book was really challenging for me because there are a lot more voices in there now.\u201d<\/p>\n Bryant\u2019s third book is the strongest of the three, in part because of the way she grappled with those voices. The protagonists are Reggie, a Black Dungeons & Dragons gamer who struggled with where and how to fit into society, and Delilah, a biracial singer who helps catapult a young rock band to viral stardom, only to find herself uncomfortable with how she\u2019s seen by a white audience.<\/p>\n \u201cBeing biracial, having people tell you you\u2019re not \u2018really\u2019 Black, that was something I dealt with when I was, you know, a kid,\u201d Bryant said. \u201cAnd I dealt with it and thought I was good. Then now I\u2019m in my 30s and I\u2019m getting hateful and racist messages online and it\u2019s like, \u2018Wait, am <\/i>I good?\u2019 And that\u2019s some of what I wanted to get into with Delilah\u2019s character, that exploration of your own identity and how other people view you. I thought about that a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n The love story between the two teens is told from both of their perspectives, as they spend a year falling in love, marked by different holidays. Bryant\u2019s books have been well-reviewed and received for being believable love stories about Black teens, but this book rings especially true in the back-and-forth tension between its protagonists.<\/p>\n This comes largely from the way Bryant\u2019s characters think through their identities, the way real teenagers do, with ideas that are sometimes messy and contradictory. There\u2019s nothing tidy about the way the characters figure themselves out.<\/p>\n \u201cHaving all those voices in my head, listening to them, it was a battle trying to write this book,\u201d said Bryant. \u201cIt took a little longer. But I had to get back to that space where I wrote my first two books: What do I like? What\u2019s making me sit and giggle at my desk? What\u2019s bringing me joy? And shutting everything out and focusing on that let me write something genuine to me. Once I got back to that place it was fun again.\u201d<\/p>\n Long Beach readers will enjoy looking for local landmarks in the book\u2014parks, dessert shops, neighborhoods\u2014as they did with Bryant\u2019s first two books. Like those books, even though it\u2019s a major national release, she\u2019ll be launching it locally, at Bel Canto Books on Fourth Street.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/img.lbpost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/30081739\/Screen-Shot-2023-01-30-at-8.17.21-AM-1110x1003.png\")