Everything Is Not Enough

Akerstrom's sequel follows three Black women navigating ambition and its costs, and reviewers have consistently pointed to the same strength: she lets her characters be selfish, angry, and wrong without using those flaws to punish or redeem them, which is a deliberate break from narratives that require Black women protagonists to be exemplary. The racism the characters face isn't staged as a single dramatic event but as a recurring, structural drag on their careers and relationships, which gives the novel more accumulated weight than a plot summary suggests. It's less interested in resolution than in honestly rendering the exhaustion of being underestimated in rooms you've earned a place in.