Lakewood ★★★☆☆

Lakewood (Click Here To Buy)

★★★☆☆

Lakewood by Megan Giddings is a fiction book about a Black woman who decides to become part of a secret research study.

I read this on my Kindle as an ebook on loan from the library.

Lena Johnson is struggling to make ends meet after her grandmother passes away from cancer and the medical bills for Lena’s mother start piling up. Lena decides to join a mysterious study called “The Lakewood Project” that pays extremely well and has great health insurance. Lena soon discovers that things are not as they seem as these, mostly white, researchers conduct ethically questionable experiments on mostly Black participants. Lena undergoes some horrific side-effects from pills taken for a study on memory and her grasp on reality begins to blur. Things slowly start to get worse and worse for Lena and she has to decide whether the pay from the experiments or her livelihood/wellbeing are worth more.

Overall this book was pretty good, there were a few places where the style and the story just didn’t quite come together but I still enjoyed it. There’s a book called Medical Apartheid by Harriet T. Washington that has been on my TBR for a hot minute that is non-fiction and about the dark history of medical experimentation on Black Americans and this book seemed almost like a fictionalized version of that.

If you liked Lakewood, I also recommend We Cast A Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff, When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole, and Kindred by Octavia Butler.

#happyreading

Ms.Bjork