The Black Girl Survives in This One is an anthology comprised of 15 short horror stories in different sub genres. Some are more traditional horror while some involve real life issues such as MLMs (my personal favorite story!) and they were all great! Each one was such an interesting read and while I enjoyed some more than others, I would reread all of them.

The narration by Shayna Small was absolutely amazing and I loved her in each story. The forward was read by Tananarive Due which was a wonderful surprise.

Thank you so much to Netgalley, all of the authors, and Macmillan Audio for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review. I can’t wait for everyone else to read this on March 26th!

I have posted my review on Goodreads, in my Facebook book club, and will post a Tiktok review the night before it releases.

This is going immediately to my favorites shelf. What an incredible showcase of talent, fresh voices and imaginative stories. Narration was absolutely faultless. Every single story was a 5 star read. I'd like to thank the team behind the book for this gift. What a read! It is evident in every page that the team invested in this book and production. I don't have a single editing or narration bone to pick. And the cover is gorgeous!

There is nothing like finding yourself in a book. There is nothing like understanding the shorthand, relating to the subtext, hearing the words not spoken. This was so much fun. I can't wait to re-read it for spooky season and to tell everyone and their momma all about it.

(My only note is a small mispronunciation in Black Pride when the phrase "lead foot" as in the heavy metal used in reference to a person's habit of driving too fast., is pronounced instead lead as in "the initiative in an action; an example for others to follow. 'the US is now taking the environmental lead')

I am always a fan of a horror anthology, but THE BLACK GIRL SURVIVES IN THIS ONE absolutely knocked it out of the park. It takes a somewhat unspoken trope of horror and turns it all on its head, with each author presenting their own unique take. Even though I technically knew the outcome of each story, it didn’t stop me from being constantly on the edge of my seat while reading. It also felt like each story was really solid and well-developed, not just a snippet taken from another story or a story that's short because it isn’t fully performed. There were just so many different interesting horror concepts, from the classic haunted houses and rituals to galactic horror. The audiobook was also a super engaging way to read and made this already great book so hard to put down! The narrator, Shayna Small, helped make the stories feel distinct and kept the tension high. I absolutely recommend if you’re a horror fan or even trying to get into horror, it’s definitely worth the read!

♡ Audiobook Review ♡
♤ Release April 7 ♤
- short stories
Love, love, love this audiobook. Let me go pre-order my physical copies. If you want the black girl to SURVIVE or WIN. this book is for you!
It's an anthology of black female ya horror stories! I enjoyed every story that was told in this book.
The narrators Shayna Small and Tananarive Due did a phenomenal job bringing these stories to live.

Where do I even start? I’ll start with this: We all know that in short story collections there’s always going to be a story or two that we don’t like. That’s just the nature of the genre. But that didn’t happen to me here. I loved every single story in this collection. And that’s impressive because it contains 15 stories. I was fully immersed in every story. Horror books never scare me but I found that I didn’t want to read this book at night because so many of the stories did scare me a little. In spite of the fact that I knew all of the girls would survive I was still on edge, wondering how they could possibly escape the situations they were in, and hoping and praying they’d reach the end of their stories.

The stories were all very different from each other so there was a lot of variety in this book and it never felt boring or repetitive. That’s a big part of why I was always able to stay engaged. Whenever I started a new story I wondered what fun new concept I was about to be introduced to. I’m not a big YA reader, as you’ll already know if you follow me, but the fact that this book was YA didn’t bother me at all. These girls were my little sisters ok?!?! I was rooting for them!!! Reading this and having to deal with everything that was attacking my girls was very much a “GET A JOB!!!! STAY AWAY FROM HER!!!!” situation for me.

My only complaint about this book is that it ended. I was SO upset when I reached the end.

It’s a bit difficult to review a collection as a whole because I’m unable to comment on specific aspects of the writing and individual plots/stories. But I’ll just end by saying that I loved this book

First, let me just say that I absolutely loved this anthology. When I saw this title and the cover of this book I instantly wanted to read this book.
"The Black Girl Survives in this One" is an anthology of short horror stories that have young Black girls as the main character and the focal point of each story. The preface of this anthology highlights the fact that in most horror stories the black character is not the primary character, and they often find themselves dead early in the story. In this book, each author tells a horror story with a young black girls who becomes the hero to their family, friends, and community. Each black girl finds her strength and will power to persevere and survive the onslaught of horror they each encounter.
I loved the progression of each horror story, and I as the reader was invested in each Black girls fate.
Giving each writer, and the editor of this book a virtual high five! Well done!
I recommend this book to those who love horror, and fans of black writers. This is such a great collection of horror stories.
Thank you Net-galley and Macmillan audio for the opportunity to listen to this arc.

this is a 5 out of 5!!!! so so so good each story was creepy and I loved every min this was such a good read the very first story was my favorite This anthology was amazing!. I didn't want the stories to end!!!! I listened on audio and I'm so glad I did I think it made it so much better!As always with compilations, some are better than others but all were definitely interesting and I recommend this to anyone !

Thank you to Flatiron and Netgalley for gifting me an advanced copy of this book!

This YA horror anthology is for the Black girls who always wanted to be the final girl. As with all anthologies, there were stories that I REALLY enjoyed and some that fell flat for me. Overall, I found this audiobook to be enjoyable and engaging.

My favorite stories from the anthology:
Harvesters
Queeniums for Greenium!
Inheritance
The Black Strings
Foxhunt

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
5 stars all around!! This book did it for me y’all. Every story was phenomenal. Shout out to BLACK WOMEN. What a time to read this book, as we celebrate women’s resilience during the month of March. This book of 15 short stories features tales of courageous black women that were determined to make it out alive at any cost. Oftentimes women who look like me do not survive in the world of horror and are usually a pawn in someone else’s story but this time it was different. We made the rules, we made the ending and I loved every bit of it. Y’all please, please, please pick this one up when it releases (or gone head and do that preorder) next month, 4/2!

First off, many thanks to NetGalley for letting me read this book as an audio ARC! I greatly appreciate it!
What a fun collection of stories this was! Most of these were good, a few were great, and one had me saying "That's how it ends? Really? Lame!" out loud, but y'know, it's an anthology. There's bound to be at least one dud. But only one dud among so many stories? Pretty impressive!
I can't really comment on the characters or the writing style, since it changes from entry to entry, but overall very good!
A very solid four stars for The The Black Girl Survives in This One!

The Black Girl Survives in This One edited by Desiree S. Evans and Saraciea J. Fennell is spectacular! I absolutely love this collection of horror short stories. Each one better than the last and offer a different perspective on YA horror. I'm planning to seek out the backlist of each author and read more of their work. Creepy and well written, The Black Girl Survives in This One may be my favorite YA horror anthology of the year.

I loved seeing all the representations of black girls in these scary stories. Braids, TWAs, and locs floating in space... we don't always get to see ourselves like this and surviving in these horror stories! You get a wide variety of horror from ghosts, aliens, mythical creatures, curses, shapeshifters, zombies, folklore, racism, and more. It's a collection so obviously I loved certain stories more and I felt a few fell flat. I love that Tananarive Due did the forward! The first story, The Harvesters, was one of my favorites. We started off with a bang! I was genuinely creeped out. I think the narrator's performance contributed greatly because I don't think I would feel the way with every story simply with just reading. The Skittering Thing's performance gave me goosebumps and I'm not sure it would in print. (Her pronunciation of Biloxi and Dominica threw me off a little though. LOL) The Screamers, The Brides of Devil's Bayou, and Black Girl Nature Group also were standouts. The pharmacist in me was screaming at those MLM scammers in Queeniums for Greenium! Overall, a great anthology to see the black girl indeed surviving in each one! Thanks to Flatiron Books for providing me with this advanced listening copy through NetGalley!

3.5 stars rounded up

This is a really solid collection of short stories. Of course some are better than others, but overall it's a YA horror collection where authors play with classic tropes in new ways, centering young Black women who do in fact survive. (as the title should clue you in) Some stories are funny, some are creepy, some are both but I had a good time reading these and none of them were really bad.

I'll share a couple of my favorites. Queeniums for Greenium by Brittney Morris had me cackling at the sendup of MLM culture, but make it horror. My other favorite is the final story in the collection- Foxhunt by Charlotte Nicole Davis features a queer Black girl and offers a take on the creepy game, but in high school. Those two really stood out and made excellent use of the short story framework. And it tracks, because I've loved other books from both authors. The audio narration is great and delivers the creepy vibes when needed fairly well. I received an audio review copy of this book via NetGalley, all opinions are my own.

Thank you To Netgalley for giving me an Arc of this story.
SPOILERS TO FOLLOW

Whenever I read anthologies, I try to talk about the book as a whole and also touch on each individual story. Overall I enjoyed most of these stories. I think with a lot of anthologies I've read there are some that get me and some that don't. Since I anticipated this being more of a horror story, I expected many of these to frighten me. I think there was only one or two that actually scared me though unfortunately. Most just fell a bit flat or didn't have any scare factor for me at all. Other people might feel different about this stories though. Here's my thoughts on all of them!

1.Harvesters: This one was genuinely really creepy. It reminded me of In the Tall Grass a little bit (except it was corn in this story). I think it mainly scared me because while the Black girl does survive in the end (as the title implies) her actual fate after the story ends was... iffy. She didn't actually escape the creature chasing her like she thought and I think that itself was horrifying to me that she realized this too late.

2.Welcome Back to The Cosmos: Any story about space is going to fucking terrify me and just like in the first story (Harvesters) the idea that someone can shapeshift into someone you know and take their place... is horrifying. As with the first one, she didn't realize something was wrong UNTIL IT WAS TOO LATE. It's very creepy and stressful TBH.

3.Ghost Light: I love a good ghost story but... this wasn't that good. As a fellow theatre kid who performed shows in a "haunted theatre" (does every theatre group try to scare the new freshman with a story like this?) I thought I'd really enjoy this. It felt a little rushed though (understandable since it's meant to be a short story) but I felt like this could have been a good idea for a full length novel and not something short like this.

4.The Brides of Devil's Bayou: This was an interesting story with the generational abductions that kept happening in her family but it wasn't really scary to me. The dreams she was having were scary though but overall I wasn't very moved by this.

5.TMI: This story was just... confusing ??? I say confusing because I didn't understand what I was supposed to be scared about. I'm sure there were downsides to this flip phone that would help you read peoples minds but since the characters were so vague about particulars I didn't feel the sense of urgency that other characters were having in previous stories. The ending was also very abrupt.

6. Black Pride: Another story that wasn't scary but I really, really enjoyed it. Iv'e always been a fan of were-shifts. The twist for this story was really fun! I didn't expect it to be ALL of her friends but that made it better. I also liked how it took place in a different era than the other stories. The visuals were really on point for this one.

7. The Screamers: This one was kind of... cheesy. It was another ghost possession story but instead of being scared for the characters I just thought it was a little funny how the haunting was being presented. I did like the characterization though of Amani's relationship with her brother and her guilt over what happened. The portrayal of grief in this story was the best aspect of it.

8. Queeniums for Geranium: Honestly.... I did not like this one. The way the story played out felt very farfetched. When she went from "This is weird" to immediately climbing into the air vents to find a way out all I could think was "That would not be my first thought if I was trapped". Most air vents I see aren't big enough for someone to crawl into either so that didn't feel real to me. I also just didn't understand how she could care so much for her sister after what she did to her! Then again I'm a little petty.

9. Inheritance: I think it might be my fault that I didn't understand this story. I don't think I was paying as good attention as I should have. The creature that was described in it sounded cool, especially since I'd never heard of it before but the events between Delaney and Miles in the attic confused me since it kept hopping back and forth between the past and the present.

10. Black Girl Nature Group: While I obviously loved that the girls got their revenge and escaped, this story also felt a bit cheesy. I was confused how the girls were trapped in an invisible dome? What was keeping them there? How? This invisible dome concept is also used in Local Color and I was surprised to see it brought up twice.

11. Cemetery Dance Party: Another cheesy story but with zombies this time!! The fate of these characters was... confusing. I wasn't sure how many kids actually escaped the cemetery other than the three? four? I think that had stuck together. Did the rest of that senior class die? Did the zombies escape the cemetery or were they confined to the grounds because that was how the curse worked? It was very unclear. I did enjoy the zombies though despite the cheesiness in the beginning of the story.

12. The Skittering Thing: This one was also a little confusing? I don't understand why the girls would play this weird hide-n-seek game with this girl they barely knew and their parents. The parents playign was the real surprising part of it. The parents weren't bad people, they seemed genuinely nice but it was just weird. The ending though was terrifying. I think I'm really just afraid of things or creatures that can shape shift into people you know and trick you.

13. The Black Strings: This reminded me of a movie or another book I read but I'm not sure what exactly. I kept trying to guess the ending and found that I was wrong every time. I kept expecting the killer to be certain people and then those people would DIE and I was like "whelp it's this person then". I also don't understand Nora's reasoning at the end of the story for why she did what she did? In the end their band didn't win anyways so what was the point of all of it.

14. Local Color: Did not expect the grandpa to ALSO be a shapeshifter. It was pretty gross too that she gave the shapeshifting creature (?) her first kiss on accident. I'd be horrified if I was her. I also don't understand how a book about old myths would have a map of her hometown park? I had thought the map was for somewhere else at first when she talked about it but I must have not been paying attention again when she talked about it.

15. Fox Hunt: This felt like a movie Jordan Peele would write. I was glad this anthology ended with a really good story. I had kind of guessed what was going to happen before it did but the way that it was written was incredible. I loved that she was able to fight back against the people attacking her. I was rooting for her hardcore and was glad she gained her autonomy!

As always with compilations, some are better than others but all were definitely interesting. Some of them I still think about and definitely warranted me turning off the audiobook and calm my racing heart a bit. Overall, a solid 4 stars.

- Harvesters by LL McKinney: Missy and Jo are at a party and are offered a ride home but have to walk through a cornfield first.

This one. This one creeped me out more than I anticipated. The last line just … chills.

- Welcome Back to the Cosmos by Kortney Nash: A crew explores an abandoned space building in space

Another one that just hit with the last line. I usually have zero interest in anything space related but this one was good.

- Ghost Light by Erin E. Adams: After her play went awry, Justine learns the ghost legend might actually be true.

I liked this one, didn’t love it.

- The Brides of Devil's Bayou by Desiree S. Evans: Aja and her friend celebrate her birthday in Louisiana against her fathers wishes

Generational curses + Louisiana horror = excellence

- TMI by Zakiya Dalila Harris: Sam meets her favorite writer, Etta Vee, and “accidentally” takes her phone

This one was really short. Felt Twilight Zone-y. Not my favorite.

- Black Pride by Justina Ireland: A summer trip to the lake has Sheryl seeing her friends and social justice differently

I really enjoyed this one. I will think about it for a while.

- The Screamers by Daka Hermon: A grieving family moves into a new house with a sinister past

This wasn’t bad, fast paced, but just felt very … overdone theme wise

- Queeniums for Greenium! by Brittney Morris: Synthia’s sister invites her on a smoothie retreat

Very Stepford Wives meets MLM. Felt very predictable.

- Inheritance by Camara Aaron: Instead of your usual seven minutes in heaven, Delany tells of her summer in Dominica

This was really interesting. Loved the folklore.

- Black Girl Nature Group by Maika Moulite and Maritza Moulite: A girl goes on a nature hike with a group at the same place her aunt went missing

I liked it, even as predictable as it was.

- Cemetery Dance Party by Saraciea J. Fennell: A high school senior throws a party at a cemetery

I didn’t love this one either, felt a little disrespectful.

- The Skittering Thing by Monia Brashears: Charlotte and Sunny befriend the mysterious new girl and play a weird sleepover game

I had no idea where this one was going. It was creepy and I loved every second of it.

- The Black Strings by Vincent Tirado: Mal, at a band competition, can see others deaths

Another one I didn’t love, idea was cool but it didn’t give me the creep factor

- Local Color by Eden Royce: Veronne finds a map that she thinks will help her find her parents

This one felt more heartwarming in the end instead of creepy.

- Foxhunt by Charlotte Nicole Davis: New girl Flex is chosen to be the “Fox” at her new schools senior game

A great ending to the compilation. This was a good story that had me rooting for Flex the whole time.

I read my first Tananarive Due book in 2018 and I was hooked! She wrote the foreword for The Black Girl Survives in This One and I trust her opinion fully!

This book is full of amazing girls that fight off horrible monsters and evil people in society. The collection of stories is extremely unique and empowering. I love reading anthologies like this because I have a whole new bunch of authors to check out now! The narrators did a great job of telling each story.

Thank you to NetGalley, Flatiron Books, MacMillan Audio, Desiree S. Evans and Saracen J. Fennell. I have written this review voluntarily.

I'm really impressed!! I liked every single story in this! They were all really strong, I do have some favorites and some that I would ADORE to have full length novels of. Every story had the elements of horror that I loved, there's every type of horror you could wish for in here! Overall a really fantastic collection from a bunch of really talented authors who I can't wait to read more from!

I was initially intrigued by this book for its title and cover art. The dedication and foreword got me hooked. This book has such a broad range of horror stories. From ghosts, to aliens to zombies to religious horror even! It also deals with a lot of heavy subjects like obvious racism within the black horror community, anxiety, fatphobia. There’s a lot of great representation throughout each story. But, like any book of short stories there are some weaker ones that didn’t hold my attention as much. They were still entertaining just didn’t make a lasting impact on me.

My favorites would have to be the brides of the devils bayou by Desiree S. Evans, black pride by Justina Ireland, black girl nature group by Maritza & Maika Mouliteand black strings by Vincent Tirado.

I would recommend this to any horror reader especially young black and brown horror readers.

Thank you Netgalley and Macmillan audio for an advanced audio copy.

The black girl survives in this one is our April 1!

This anthology was amazing!
I enjoyed every single story in this collection and was addicted to hearing more.
Why did I give it 4 stars then?
I wanted more of nearly every short.
They were all so well crafted that I wanted to continue listening to these creepy bedtime stories.
I am excited to check out more work from the authors I had not heard of prior to this.
Much love to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for my ALC!

Be warned, dear reader: The Black girls survive in this one.

Celebrating a new generation of bestselling and acclaimed Black writers, The Black Girl Survives in This One makes space for Black girls in horror. Fifteen chilling and thought-provoking stories place Black girls front and center as heroes and survivors who slay monsters, battle spirits, and face down death. Prepare to be terrified and left breathless by the pieces in this anthology.

The bestselling and acclaimed authors include Erin E. Adams, Monica Brashears, Charlotte Nicole Davis, Desiree S. Evans, Saraciea J. Fennell, Zakiya Dalila Harris, Daka Hermon, Justina Ireland, L. L. McKinney, Brittney Morris, Maritza & Maika Moulite, Eden Royce, and Vincent Tirado, with a foreword by Tananarive Due.

A great anthology of middle grade horror stories. Think a more modernized version of Goosebumps for a bit of an older audience. I had a ton of fun with this one and flew through it in one day. Horror fans should love this like I did:)