Categories
book reviews

Book Review: ‘Tiffany Sly Lives Here Now’ by Dana L. Davis

Tiffany Sly Lives Here Now

Tiffany Sly Lives Here Now by Dana L. Davis

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


“Tiffany Sly Lives Here Now” by Dana L. Davis is a wonderfully complex YA novel about a girl from Chicago dealing with her mother’s death who moves to California to be with her biological father when there’s another man claiming to be her father.

The story starts with Tiffany Sly, a 16-year-old from Chicago, arriving at LAX in Los Angeles to meet the father she never knew. Instead a driver is there to pick her up to whisk her away to Simi Valley where her wealthy doctor father and his family lives. During the ride, Tiffany’s anxiety revs up and has been up since her mother died from cancer. Once she arrives at the home, she meets her new stepmom and four other sisters she didn’t know about. After meeting her father, who’s fair-skinned with blue eyes, she’s doubtful about the genetic connection with her dark brown skin. Then she recalls how another man, whom she believes she looks like including the complexion, had showed up at her apartment in Chicago the day before claiming to be her father, too. He even threatens legal action in a week, so Tiffany has a week to see if her California life will work in that matter of time before coming clean to her new family.

Categories
book reviews

Book Review: ‘The Hate U Give’ by Angie Thomas

The Hate U GiveThe Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“The Hate U Give” by Angie Thomas looks into the Black Lives Matter movement from a personal viewpoint of a Black teen struggling in two different worlds, and it’s done perfectly.

Starr lives in Garden Heights, the predominantly Black side of the city riddled with crime, but attends Williamson Prep in the ritzy white suburb. While she balances her two personalities in these two different places, she gets caught up at a party where a shooting breaks out. She runs out with her childhood friend, Khalil, and they drive off. A police officer soon stops them for something trivial, and for showing attitude, Khalil gets shot and killed for reaching in his car for his hairbrush. The officer mistook it for a gun. And now Starr as the witness struggles with what comes after.

Starr deals with her nurse mother and ex-con father who owns a grocery store in the neighborhood; her old half-brother Seven who feels he has to take care of his other family under siege by a ganglord; her cop uncle; her white girlfriend Hailey who makes racist comments at school; insecurities around her white boyfriend Chris; and all her friends and neighbors in Garden Heights she feels she’s hurting somehow for not knowing how to approach the situation.

The novel explores a real young Black girl perspective unheard of in the young adult genre, so it was exciting to read that voice. Her voice is raw, so at first it’s wonky to get used to the slang and how she explains her world, but it comes through fast enough to the point where the reader can get devoured by what’s going on. There are a lot of elements, but it shows real-life situations for a teen girl living in two worlds and seeing her friend die at the hands of a cop. Definitely a must-read for being a genre standout and looking forward to how the book will play out on the silver screen.

View all my reviews

Categories
book reviews

Book Review: ‘Everything, Everything’ by Nicola Yoon

Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This young adult debut is simplistically entertaining. I’m working on a young adult novel, so I saw this one was going to become a film after being released just a year ago. It’s about a girl named Maddy who has that condition of being allergic to everything who’s kept in the house all day and starts to spy on her new cute neighbor, Olly.

They fall in love by sharing at first posters against their bedroom windows to instant messaging each other constantly. As they learn more about each other, they’re determined to actually meet in person. With Maddy like a modern-day Rapunzel stuck in her house all day, Olly tries to figure out how to be with her. Maddy’s home nurse, Carla, secretly allows them to meet in person in the house with extra disinfection without letting Maddy’s mother Pauline know. Carla can’t keep letting the secret meetings to happen because they’ll be too hard to hide from Pauline, her boss. This triggers more drastic measures for Maddy to take as she uses her credit card to purchase tickets to Hawaii for she and Olly. It shows how much Maddy is willing to sacrifice to not only have a friend but a connection to the real world she never experienced.

The storyline was simple yet I kept flipping to see what was next. It’s broken into short chapters with illustrations done by her husband David Yoon, which makes the entire book more digestible. Maddy’s curiosity and desperation to go outside is apparent on almost page as she draws figures, write book reviews, and occupy herself all day with home school and other brain-teasing activities.

The one thing that didn’t jive was the character is supposed to be half black and half Japanese since the author has an interracial family, but adding race and culture to the character fell flat. If the author wanted it to be a factor, then it really needed to be a factor, with incorporating more culture in the relationship between Maddie and her mother; or describing their physical features more; or having Maddie question Olly’s attraction to her because of her race and skin color—these are all real moments for a teenage girl that could’ve been added in lightly to the storyline. And even though Maddie hadn’t been in the real world, she was home-schooled and took history, so she knew race is an issue.

Overall, it was cute quick read, and I look forward to seeing the movie.

View all my reviews