Front Desk by Kelly Yang

One of my kids gave me the American Library Association's book of 52 books that are targeted by book banning groups, and this book is on that list. I am working my way through it, and this one is aimed at a middle school audience, which is not a genre I read at all. I related to a review that I read that noted that she did not read younger than Young Adults (although I do like a good picture book on occasion and I do have grandchildren who are getting old enough to be covered in this genre and I will be doing more of it as a result). The reason that that this book is being targeted by angry white adults is that they are scandalized that a children’s book would dare talk about racism. The racism in this book is very much in your face rather than more subtle, which is what I would expect for a book aimed at a middle school audience, but which was a bit glaring and heavy handed to my adult ear. The story is about Mia, who helps her parents manage a low end motel where there are some long term residents. She faces prejudice at school and while she works, and it is quite recognizable. Mia sees that immigrants and Asians are not the only people targeted, and when she sees a favored hotel resident who is African American get treated unfairly, she sticks up for him in an anti-racist manner that is very appropriate and is a great example of how to do that.

Harriet The Spy by Louise Fitzhugh

This book, when I read it as a kid, made it seem possible to be independent, brainy, and comfortable with all that. The author illustrated the book herself, and Harriet is a decidedly unfeminine character, and one who is comfortable in her own unconventional skin. I reread it probably 50 years after my first reading, thinking that perhaps it would be a good gift for our granddaughters. Harriet is a flawed but very relatable protagonist. She is dedicated to her routine of spying on her peers and her neighbors--she is an outsider looking in. There are a lot of things that are very relatable about her, and it is not a book for tweens where everything comes out okay in the end, which is much like life itself. Harriet tells it like she sees it in her journal of spy observations, and she is not one to sugar coat it. When her fellow students get ahold of her journal and find out all the unkind things she has said, they shun her, and her struggle to figure out what to do about that is so relatable. The person she listens to best writes her a letter and tells her that sometimes you have to apologize and sometimes you have to lie. Period. Harriet struggles with that mightily. What I did not realize before I reread this is that the author herself was gay and that Harriet the Spy has a gay cult following. There is not a hint of sexual preference to my ear in the book, but Harriet is an iconoclast and an outsider, she has tomboy vibes, and she is fine with all of that, so it makes sense, but I did not know.

Heiress Takes All by Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka

I have generally enjoyed the YA books that Reese Witherspoon has picked for her book club, and this mat very well hit the spot for the target audience, but I did not love it. A daughter, Olivia, who's father is marrying his 3rd wife has invited her to the wedding--she is a product of marriage number one, and when that ended, she and her mother were left penniless, withouth health insurance, and in dept. he mother has worked multiple minimum wage jobs, and Olivia is out for revenge. Ok, that is all understandable, but what I do not get is why her crew agree to help her with the plan to get the codes to her father's off shore bank accounts and transfer the fortune she sees as her birth right, but why would the rest of them aid and abet her? So once that disbelief is suspending we can move on. With the help of an eclectic crew of high school students and one former teacher, Olivia has plotted her mid-nuptial heist down to the second. But she didn't plan for an obnoxiously nosy wedding guest, an interfering ex-boyfriend intent on winning her back, greedy European cousins with their own agenda, or a vengeful second wife. When everything seems like it's going wrong, Olivia has to keep her eyes on what really matters: getting rich. It is slow going and a few plot twists along the way--which set us up for a sequel--and all does not turn out as hoped.

Throwback by Maureen Go

I picked this up because it is a YA pick for Reese’s book club and I have very much enjoyed her selections. Priscilla, a first-generation Korean American and former high school cheerleader, expects her daughter, Sam, to pursue the All-American dream. But Sam isn't interested in the clichéd high school experience; she's a modern Gen Z teen. After a huge argument, Sam is transported back to the '90s alongside a 17-year-old Priscilla. It may be a bit contrived, bed but this time-travel tale brilliantly explores family, identity, and the immigrant experience making it a must-read for teens. There are plenty of LOL-worthy moments as Sam tries to navigate the '90s. However, the most poignant moments occur when Sam realizes how casual racism, cultural differences, and the pressure to meet Halmoni, Sam’s grandmother, and see how her expectations have shaped Priscilla into who she is today. I didn't enjoy this as much as others that I have read in the past but I would read another book by this author and I did like the time travel aspect in retrospect even though I found it odd at when I was reading it.

Stuck Up and Stupid by Angourie and Karen Rice

I read broadly. Not a week goes by where I do not read some or all of a murder mystery--I hesitate to say daily, because sometimes I am flying, or sick, but really, while I read award winning fiction and non-fiction, I also read across the spectrum of what is available in written form. I point this out because rarely do I rate a book at 2-stars, and that is my assessment of this book. I also have read more than half of Reese Witherspoon's monthly picks--as celebrity book clubs go, hers is far and away my favorite, and I picked this because it is one of her picks. For me it fell flat. This is a modern-day Australian take on Pride & Prejudice--for me, this is one of the issues with the book, that it adheres too closely to the original, which you might think would be an advantage, but for me at least it made some of the events seem oddly out of place and the ending abrupt and unsupported by what happened before it.

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.