White Lines II

White Lines II: Sunny
Tracey Brown

One of my “literary pet peeves” is “ contemporary street lit”- books about hustler’s  Wives and what not that glorify and glamourize a life that usually ends in the graveyard or a jail cell.  I detest these type of books and stay as far away from them as I can. With that being said, I’m still not sure how I came across the original White Lines but I ended up loving it. It was one book which showed that while it looks like glitz and glamour what’s underneath is often the furthest thing from it.

Over the years I’d seen other Tracey Brown books on the shelves, but I  was only interested in White Lines so imagine my surprise when I found one was finally published.

White Lines II begins a few years after the first one left off. I admits that I had to go back and skim WL, because it had been so long ( 5 years!) since I read the original but in the sequel, Sunny is enjoying life a wife and mother but yet still grieving the loss of her beloved Dorian. She’s come a long way since giving up her addiction a few years ago and aided by 2 stints in rehab is doing good. Except she sometimes misses her old life- the parties, the glitz and glamour and on a trip for her latest business venture,  she finds what she has been missing both in her love life and in her “secret”. As she struggles to maintain both, she ends up risking everything.

While the book mainly focuses on Sunny,  we are also reintroduced to Jada ( my favorite character) who is trying to re-kindle her relationship with Born despite their past and raise her son Sheldon who is fighting his own set of demons. There are some other minor characters- Jada’s sister Ava, Olivia and Zion, whom I gather are from her other books.  As Sunny fight her growing dependence on her old friend, Jada struggles with her own demons regarding her child, his father and her actions while pregnant.

I realize this book was about Sunny and while I enjoyed her perspective, I have to say that I found Jada’s storyline much more interesting and almost wish this was focused just on her.

This book ends in the ultimate cliffhanger and after seeing that this was just recently published, I hope we don’t have to wait too long for the sequel because I am dying to know what happens next.

This book was as gritty or as real to me as WL was, there was lots of references to designer clothing and cars that I don’t remember from the first one but that seems to be a staple in Urban fiction  which I honestly find annoying to describe every outfit complete with what designers- Chanel dress, Loubotioun shoes). Aside from that I enjoyed this book almost as much as the original but it seemed lacking in character development in some areas- for instance- Ava just seemed to be thrown in there for good measure at times- there wasn’t much character development going on there.

Overall, I enjoyed this book. It doesn’t live up to WhiteLines in my book, buts its solid on its own and I definitely wasn’t disappointed.