The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin

I did not know that this author was originally an illustrator and that she drew the original 'Wrinkle In Time" cover--so she is a multi-talented person. Instead, I read this in search of a challenge on Goodreads, and and picked this amongst other choices because it is Newberry medal winner. One review that I read called it a baby "Knives Out", which I think is an apt description. Samuel Westing, a reclusive man who had been a humble immigrant before becoming a union-busting paper-products magnate. Westing is found dead, presumed murdered, and sixteen letters are quickly delivered from his estate, inviting the inhabitants and workers of his engineered apartment complex called Sunset Towers to a reading of the tycoon’s will. A lawyer divides the group into eight pairs and announces that they are all potential heirs to Westing’s two-hundred-million-dollar fortune. He distributes eight envelopes filled with seemingly nonsensical clues and instructs the guests that the objective of the unexplained game is to win. There is a lot left unsaid, and the trick is to figure out not only how to stay in the game, but what exactly winning entails.

How To End A Love Story by Yulin Kuang

I would have pegged this as a YA Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick, but instead it is a straight ahead adult pick. I stand by my assessment, and it does have characteristics I like about her picks in both categories. Helen Zhang was a nerd in high school, prone to keeping her head down and writing rather than athletics. Grant Shephard is the quarterback of the football team and prom king. Their lives collide when he is behind the wheel when Helen's suicidal sister steps in front of his car. They share this trauma but in Helen's family, Grant is the bad guy. Fast forward to the present when they are 30 somethings--Helen is the author of a successful YA series that is being made into a television series and Grant is a seasoned Hollywood script writer who is on the team bringing her books to life. They are both invested in the team not finding out what their real connection is, and they have the inevitable prickly first interactions that lead you know where. It is not just a romance novel but also about the ripple of trauma across ones life. A bit unrealistic, but also enjoyable.

Up a Road Slowly by Irene Hunt

I bought this as a second hand book at the library in South Pomfret, Vermont--which is quintessentially Vermont, in that it is a very cool building, it had books for sale scattered outside, inside in the lobby, at the top on the basement stairs and then all through the basement (which, it being a funky house of a certain age, was surprisingly dry and intact). I used to passionately browse through used books stores and find gems to bring home--now I have shelves that groan with decades of this behavior and at the same time so much is available electronically--and easily--that my drive to do so has waned somewhat, but every so often I make a discovery that makes me think again about easing up on that endeavor. This book won the Newberry Medal in 1967 and it really is a reflection on that rapidly changing time, when young women could look towards doing something for themselves, not simply serving the needs of others, not being a family's answer to whatever problem they might have that required a warm body to see it through, to be able to be smart, educated, and independent. It is a story of a young girl growing up, falling in love, and getting ready to go to college in the 1960's and I read it at a time when it appears that quite a few men want to go back to a time when they had control over women and children. You can see the attraction--for them--no matter what goes on in the outside world, they have a place to be a dictator. The Handmaids Tale come to life. That is the crux of the gulf in America, that there are people who want no part of that and there are others who want a white supremacist patriarchy to prevail. They call it Christian, but it isn't--Jesus is too woke for them, they are more aligned with Old Testament hell and damnation. There really is no bridging that divide, you are either for or against it and there is no middle ground to be had any more. This story is told at just the time when there is an awakening power for those who wanted to change the way things had always been, and this is a beautiful look back at what seems like a long time ago, and yet where some would have us return to. This is well worth seeking out.

Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

This is well outside the realm of what my usual fiction read is about, and I read it because of it's enormous popularity. I really enjoyed it, and am eager to read the second book in the series, but find it a little puzzling that it is so widely loved. It seems a little too heavy on the romance for a fantasy fan, and light in that arena for a romance reader (although there are some bodice ripping scenes that might suffice for that crowd)--then again, maybe it is driven by people like me, who read neither genre. In any case, it is well worth the read. Here is a brief plot summary. Violet is the daughter of a powerful, dragon-riding general, but she always thought she’d follow her father’s footsteps and become a scribe--she is more bookish than brave, and her siblings have already followed the warrior path, so no real family pressure. They have kicked in. But her gentle father is dead and her ruthless mother has other plans. Unlike her renowned mother and siblings, Violet is no born dragon rider: she’s small and frail and would much rather read a detailed history of a war than fight in one. Despite this, out of a sense of familial legacy, she is sent to Basgiath, a war college where aspiring riders learn the ways of war. Basgiath has a famous body count (fully a third of entrants seem to die before graduation), but despite this and despite her own perceived weakness, Violet is determined to make it through, bond with a dragon, and become the rider no one thought she could become. And so the story goes, up to and including a dramatic ending that sets up the next book in the series well, and is in itself a satisfying ending.

Drama by Raina Telgemeier

I really loved this playful Young Adult graphic novel. I have been woefully under informed in this genre, which I both enjoy, and as the grandparent of two girls and a boy, I feel like I need to beef up my depth in this area. One of my role models for being successful with this goal brought this book to my attention. I am new to this author, who has several other graphic novels under her belt, has a tremendously likable and predictable style. I can see that when you open one of her books, you know it’s her. The clean, organic lines and strong color choices that sell her stories are completely fluid. They’re actually enjoyable and give life to the experience of reading her works. So that is a big help to draw the reader into the story. The thing I like this story is it captures some of the volatility of relationships in middle school, both for friendships and relationships. She has added in the reality of LGBTQ being more in the vernacular now than in hiding as it was when I was this age, and overall this has a refreshing airing of all these foibles in a refreshing way that affirms all middle schoolers lived experiences. Three cheers!

All My Rage by Sabar Tahir

This is aimed at Young Adults, and is a powerful look at the effects of poverty, racism, the pervasiveness of substance abuse and domestic violence, and how all of this echoes across generations, which makes happy endings unlikely. It is a contemporary novel that ricochets across time and place. In past Pakistan, Misbah weds Toufiq in an arranged marriage that results in a move to California after upheaval at home. Now they run a small hotel in the Mojave Desert. Their son Salahudin and dear family friend Noor hold a connection bound by their history and the challenges they face due to Islamophobia, racism, and more. When his mother’s health fails and his father battles alcoholism as he grieves, the financial and maintenance aspects of the hotel fall to Sal, who takes drastic measures to save the hotel his mother loved so very much. Simultaneously, Noor is striving to leave her uncle’s grasp by planning to go away to college, but finds herself caught up by Sal’s choices. The prose unpacks both the beautiful and the brutal and the author deftly captures the layers of grief, rage, family, examination of faith, and forgiveness, while managing to inject levity into dire situations and provide a semblance of hope.

Huda F Cares? by Huda Fahmy

I loved this. It is a saucy Huda who is an average teenager living within a traditional Muslim family in America. She wants to blend in but she sticks out. Here is her origin story: for much of her life, Huda Fahmy, a Muslim American born and raised near Detroit, was dogged by questions about her hijab. Later, as an adult living in Houston, she was frequently asked, “Aren’t you hot in that?” The answer became the name of her comic strip, “Yes I’m Hot in This,” which Fahmy began posting on Instagram. It also became the title of her first book, a graphic novel for adults published in 2018. In this she and her family travel to Disney World--by car--and somehow manage to both survive and have fun. They are trying to adapt to a world where they stick out and are cause for concern, all while being typical teenaged girls. It is frisky and serious at the same time.

Last Night At The Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

This book won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2021 and deservedly so. It is set in San Francisco in the 1950s, and tells the story of 17-year-old Lily Hu, a Chinese American who begins to question her sexuality after developing a relationship with Kath, a white girl in her class. The stand out aspect of it is that the beautiful and complex writing dares to offer up comparisons to novels that are published for adult readers. Where it really stands out, though, is in its balance of both historical realism and hope, a balance we so rarely see in queer stories. In many ways, Lily’s story evokes the expected joys of YA romance novels. We see the trope of the complicated first kiss. We watch a friendship — rooted in teenage angst — blossom into something more romantic. The simplistic third-person figural narrative allows us to see into Lily’s mind, which questions the experience of falling in love. However, the placement in society and it's insistence on realism makes the possibility for a happy ending something one could only hope for rather than expected. Did it happen? I hoped that Lily and Kath would run off together, move into their own small one-bedroom in the city and spend all their nights at the Telegraph Club (the fictional lesbian bar that brings the girls together) with their new network of queer friends.

Anatomy by Dana Schwartz

This is a Young Adult novel that very clearly fits that bill. The time is 1817 Scotland. Hazel Sinnett is a lady (like in the royal birth sense of the word) who wants to be a surgeon more than she wants to marry. Jack Currer is a resurrection man who digs up the recently dead and sells them to people who want to study bodies. When Hazel, who has been attending anatomy lectures in the guise of the dead brother, gets discovered and kicked out, she makes a bargain with the lecturer--if she can pass the physician's exam, she will be admitted to the profession and be able to apprentice under him. So she needs Jack, and what he can offer her in terms of corpses and the knowledge she can gain from them, and he helps her with that, but then he brings her patients, and she starts to work with the poor, who have little in the way of options. Together they discover a secret, and she finds an answer that she does not want to find. It is a good story, a bit gothic in tone, and I would read the next in the series.

The Lost Year by Katherine Marsh

This is a great young adult book, which juxtaposes Matthew's year of being locked down as a teen with school closed and Zoom classes because of COVID-19 with discovering his great grandmother's secret. He is living through something that he sees as hard and difficult to bear, but through GiGi he learns that when she was a girl, back in 1932 in Ukraine, there was a famine that wiped out her family. There is something great about a book that puts our current situation into perspective, and also demonstrates that Russia has been working to crush Ukraine for 100 years. Putin, walking in the shoes of Stalin, cares nothing for the people of Ukraine, they both simply want control over them, to crush their culture and their people, starving or bombing them out of existence, it matters not. Matthew and the reader learn some perspective and some history, all the while enjoying a good story well told.

Me Moth by Amber McBride

Unusually, this story is written in a lean and spare free verse. Moth, a black teen, has lost her parents and brother in a terrible car accident. She's moved from New York City to Virginia to live with her Aunt Jack, leaving not only her home and friends behind but also her dreams of becoming a famous ballerina. But she can still dream of her grandfather, who was a Hoodoo root worker and a conjurer. When he died, he left Moth a box of herbs, roots, and soil, and she continues to practice Hoodoo. Then there is Sani, a boy with long black hair tied in a knot, who is also new. He's been living in New Mexico with his Navajo father, a Medicine Man and healer, but has come to Virginia to live with his White mother and her new husband and family. He finds himself very much an outsider within the family and in the community. They are both other, outsiders who can't fit in, and who are struggling with loss. It is a story about grief, friendship, and the search for identity is rich, vibrant, haunting and unforgettable.

A Cuban Girl's Guide To Tea and Tomorrow by Laura Taylor Namey

This is another pick from Reese Witherspoon's Young Adult recommendations, and it has all the multi cultural mixings that happen in others in the group of books that she picks out. Lila is a young woman, almost 18 and recently graduated from high school. Her future doesn't hold college but rather running the family's traditional Cuban bakery in Miami. She is right on track to that success when her grandmother dies unexpectedly, and her long time boyfriend dumps her. She spins out of control and her family decides that the best solution is to send her away to a family friend in a small English town. Okay, that part seems like a stretch--more running from problems than solving them, but that is the story. There she meets a boy, Orion , who is also headed for running his family's tea shop. They form a friendship while she is expanding her baking horizons to blend in a bit of where she is with a bit of where she is from. It has a lot of classic elements of a romantic comedy but with a Cuban girl teaching her new found friends things about her culture through food.

You Should See Me In A Crown by Leah Johnson

I read this on a travel day recently, and it is a good airport read, where you can't always get a moment of quiet amidst the near constant drone of fellow passengers and overhead announcements. I found the book through Reese Witherspoon's recommended YA books, and since I am in training for having a granddaughter who will likely read in this genre soon, I am beefing up my reading in this area (I read a lot as a tween and teen, but never in this particular niche, so have some catching up to do). In this book, high schooler Liz has to come up with a new plan after losing her hoped-for college scholarship. She is living with her grandmother after her mother died far too young, and money is very tight. Her brother reminds her that the school Prom Queen is awarded a scholarship, too. Liz is hesitant because as a poor, black girl, she wasn't born in the classic mold for this. Prom Queens are generally everything Liz isn’t, which she is well aware of but she is desperate and decides to give it a go. Her dream is to get her undergraduate degree at Pennington (the school her mom went to) and then move on to medical school so she can develop a cure for sickle cell anemia—the disease that killed her mom and that her little brother Robbie inherited. And she can only do that if she secures the funds to go to Pennington. During her run for queen, Liz has a few advantages. She’s the top of her class, which accounts for a small portion of who will end up on prom court, and she has friends who are ready to strategize, campaign and completely redesign Liz’s public image. But as a shy, relatively unknown student, Liz must put herself into situations that require her to be outgoing, friendly and happy. She’ll have to battle her anxiety and make herself known when all she wants to do is sink back into non-existent bliss. Throughout the process, she makes new friends, rediscovers old ones and even loses a few. She also manages to find love in Mack, a new girl at their school also running for queen, and does a slow rolling coming out, culminating with going to the prom with her new found partner. It is a bit cliché and a bit predictable, but that is the genre in a nutshell, and I enjoyed it.

Tokyo Ever After by Emiko Jean

I have been trying to read a little more YA literature--my granddaughters will be in the target age range before I know it, and I have enjoyed this genre, so want to beef up my portfolio. I have been gradually working my way through Reese Witherspoon's YA recommendations, and this one is a winner for me. The story is Izumi, a senior in high school who grew up in a small town in Northern California never knowing who her father was. As one of the very few Asians in her town, she often feels like she doesn't really belong there-but also knows little of her Japanese heritage either. One day while snooping in her mother's room she finds a love poem written to her mother and dated the year she was born. The signature leads to an online search that reveals her father is none other than the Crown Prince of Japan. She reaches out to her father through an old friend of his, and the next thing she knows, Izumi is whisked off to Tokyo to spend a few weeks at the Imperial Palace getting to know her father and the rest of her Imperial family. This is a fun, lively story with enough heart and humor to overcome the well-used fairy-tale, rags-to-riches storyline. Narrator Izumi's voice is genuine and funny, making her easy for teens to relate to. Romantic comedy fans will enjoy the unique settings and colorful, well-developed characters, as well as some perspective on Japan and being Asian in the US.

Furia by Yamile Saied Méndez

There is a lot going on in this book. It is the story a girl in Argentina who dreams of playing soccer professionally and it is also a book about the food and culture of the world that Camila Hassan is growing up in. It is an oppressively male-dominated culture in her Rosario barrio, but she finds her joy and freedom on the soccer pitch. She can't tell anyone other than her best friend that's she's on a team because her parents forbid her from playing, but the more her team wins, the harder it is to keep the secret. And the team's becoming a force to be reckoned with, largely due to her intense, skillful play. Camila's home life is rough. Her father is an abusive bully, her brother is struggling to rise in the local soccer league, and her mom is emotionally beaten down by years of verbal abuse. Diego, her brother's best friend, complicates matters when he visits home from playing professionally in Europe and pursues a relationship with her. She can't see a way to make the relationship work with him playing halfway around the world and her pursuing her dream of playing professionally in America. The secrets and stress begin to take their toll on her, and in the end some people come through for her and she comes to see what developing her own future means in terms of what she can keep and what she has to let go.

The Downstairs Girl by Stacey Lee

I listened to this YA book that is on the Reese Witherspoon recommended reading list, and very much enjoyed it. Jo Kuan is a heroine that you can feel good about rooting for. She is a foundling who has many talents but many limitations placed upon her. Almost everything about her happens in hiding, and she is someone who should shine. When the book opens she is less than thrilled to be back working as a lady’s maid after being unceremoniously fired from her job as a milliner’s assistant – but she needs the work, and there aren’t many professional opportunities for a poor girl of Asian descent in 1890s Atlanta. Her adoptive father, Old Gin, isn’t as young as he used to be, and they can’t live on his wages alone. The only bright side is her new anonymous position as a newspaper advice columnist, Miss Sweetie, counseling Atlanta’s young and fashionable on the most important topics of the day. Her progressive takes on everything from segregated streetcars to bicycles and women’s suffrage make the column a huge success, but the more Jo speaks Miss Sweetie’s mind, the more the city clamors for her identity to be revealed. At the same time, she knows Old Gin is hiding something from her, and Jo suspects it might have something to do with her real parents. Finding out the truth could mean sacrificing both her anonymity and her steady income, not to mention her and Old Gin’s safety. The book unwinds at an enjoyable pace to an equally fine ending.

Chloe and the Kaishao Boys by Mae Coyiuto

I enjoyed this YA book about Chloe, a Filipino-Chinese girl who is turning 18, about to graduate from high school, and is getting ready to go to university after she gets into USC's animation program off the wait list. Part of turning 18 in the Philippines is having a debut (pronounced deh-BOO), which is a big celebration for a Filipino girl’s 18th birthday similar to a quinceañera. On top of all that, she’s also struggling with communication problems with her mom (who lives in America) and her dad, her burgeoning feelings for her best friend’s older brother, and a massive case of imposter syndrome regarding her skills and talent in animation. This is all layered onto Chloe's Filipino-Chinese community. Like most countries in Southeast Asia, there has always been a thriving Chinese community in the Philippines. In fact, Binondo, Chloe's neighborhood in Manila, is the oldest Chinatown in the world. And like most Chinese communities that exist in Southeast Asian countries, the blend between ethnicity and nationality can sometimes be challenging to navigate. They are Filipino, but there are also aspects to being Chinese that the community has retained. The prime example in this novel is the kaishao, a Hokkien word meaning “to introduce”. But there’s also the fact that a lot of Filipino-Chinese families also expect their children to speak Hokkien or Mandarin. There’s also what is called the “Great Wall”, a.k.a. Filipino-Chinese families who refuse to let their children date non-Chinese. All that and more is found in this fun coming of age novel.

A Thousand Steps Into The Night by Traci Chee

This book was short listed for the National Book Award in the YA category. The story centers on 17-year-old Otori Miuko, who thinks that she’s nothing special and completely unremarkable. She feels a bit too clumsy, a bit too plain, and far too loud for the world in which she lives. Miuko's father runs the only remaining guesthouse in the village of Nihaoi and Miuko is seen as a loving and dutiful daughter. In other words, in Awara Miuko is just another ordinary girl, in an ordinary life—until she is kissed by a demon, cursed, and transformed into a demon herself. Aided by a thieving magpie spirit named Geiki, Miuko sets out on the thousand step way to find a way to break the curse and save the world from the very engaging demon called Tujiyazai. But along the way, she can’t help but wonder if being a demon is as bad as she thinks. The pacing at the front end of the book is a bit slow, but it picks up speed nicely and the world it creates is lush and beautiful.

The Firekeeper's Daughter by Angeline Boulley

This book has a lot going for it and a lot going on. At the center of the book is Daunis, a graduating high school student with a complicated past and an equally complicated present. The novel opens with her in the middle of traumatic change, as her maternal grandmother has just had a stroke and months previously her maternal uncle was found dead of a meth overdose. Daunis is the biracial daughter of a white mother and an Anishinaabe man, which was a scandal at the time-- her mother was a teenager when she became pregnant, and shortly thereafter her father got another woman pregnant and married her--so Daunis has a half brother who is just a few months younger than her. The book has so much going on-- issues related to native rights, identity, traditions, and language, another is what is kinship and what does it mean, what is community and membership, then there is the problem of drugs in general and meth in particular. Then there is the role of sports in a community and how it shapes things. Finally, there are issues of responsibility--it is a very well done coming of age book and the Obamas thought so too because they bought the rights to make it into a television series.

The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen by Isaac Blum

This was long listed for the YA National Book Award category and is a thoroughly enjoyable if predictable read. It is a classic Romeo and Juliet situation, but nobody dies and the families are feuding over culture and religion rather than something else. Fifteen-year-old Yehuda “Hoodie” Rosen and his Orthodox Jewish family have recently moved to Tregaron, Pennsylvania, because the cost of living in their previous town became too expensive. The community is not overwhelmingly welcoming and the mayor is down right hostile. When Hoodie meets Anna-Marie Diaz-O’Leary, the mayor's daughter, it is a thunderbolt of interest for him. She is something else, something he hasn't seen or known. After he and Anna-Marie are spotted cleaning some up antisemitic graffiti together, both Hoodie’s father and the rabbi forbid him from seeing her again because she isn’t Jewish. So their relationship goes underground, but as they continue to grow closer, tensions rise in Tregaron. Many residents oppose the high-rise that Hoodie’s father, a developer, proposes to build in order to house more Orthodox families, and they express their opinions through verbal and physical antisemitic attacks. With so much at stake, Hoodie questions why his relationship with Anna-Marie is taboo—and whether he even wants to be part of his Orthodox community anymore.