Nicola Yoon is an author I’ve loved for a long time. I remember seeing her on a panel at BookCon where she gushed about her husband David’s upcoming debut. That book ( Frankly in Love [Buy Bookshop Amazon LibroFM] ) has now been out for years, but they way those two gush about eachother hasn’t changed one iota. I love that so much.

When I heard Nicola was writing an adult thriller instead of her usual YA romances, I was intrigued. When the lovely people at Knopf sent me a copy of One Of Our Kind, I was so eager to jump in.

One Of Our Kind [Buy Bookshop Amazon LibroFM] follows a woman named Jasmyn as she finally caves to her husband’s wishes and moves to Liberty. Liberty is billed as a black utopia. It’s bougie and everyone who lives and/or works there is black. There’s a wellness center on the hill in the middle of the town that everyone is obsessed with.

Jasmyn doesn’t understand what the appeal of the wellness center is, since she believes she should be spending her time and money helping black families instead of on ridiculous ‘treatments’. While her husband starts spending time there, she makes a couple friends with people who share her mindset. They decide to start a Black Lives Matter chapter in Liberty, but as they do, her friends start changing in unexplained ways.

This book is billed as Get Out meets The Stepford Wives [Buy Bookshop Amazon] and I definitely got the vibes. Knowing that comparison early made me on edge, waiting for the shoe to drop, which is exactly what Nicola was going for.

Overall, this was enjoyable for me. It didn’t pack the high levels of tension that I was hoping to see from a thriller. There was some tension, but it was subtle up until the last few chapters. The racial conversations can be intense at times thorughout the book, so if that’s not something you want to think about, consider yourself warned. Nicola wants readers to come to this conversation from a place of grace and admit that no one of us has all the answers to this problem.

This is definitely a different vibe than anything we’ve seen from Nicola before. Her books are usually so full of hope and joy, and this is not really either of those.