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book reviews

Book Review: ‘Concrete Rose’ by Angie Thomas

Concrete Rose by Angie Thomas

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Concrete Rose by Angie Thomas crafts the origin story of the Carter patriarch from her successful debut The Hate U Give and shows the parallels of Maverick’s teenage life in the late 1990s with his daughter Starr’s contemporary experience.

This prequel focuses on 17-year-old Maverick and his foray into unplanned parenthood amid a contentious relationship with the gang King Lords. Maverick is making amends with his girlfriend, Lisa, after a brief breakup and hanging out with his friends like gang members King and cousin Dre. But he’s keeping a secret from Lisa: He may be the father of King’s son. Maverick learns he is the father, which creates a hardship for him and his single mother and a rift between him and King. Dre is the main person Maverick can depend on since he’s also a father and preparing to marry his baby’s mother. As the big brother figure, Dre advises Maverick to get a real job at the mom-and-pops grocery instead of selling drugs. Maverick is desperate for money, but he knows his cousin is looking out for him. Then that protection disappears when Dre is shot dead in his car. Maverick is the first responder and vows to avenge his cousin’s murder. As he follows leads, Maverick is having a hard time supporting his son who he names Seven, the number he calls perfect. He has to decide if selling drugs and killing Dre’s killer is worth it when he finds out he will be a father for the second time.

As a loyal reader to Angie Thomas’ work, this novel becomes more entertaining when piecing together the timeline of seeing where Seven, Lisa, Uncle Carlos, and Starr intersect in Maverick’s life. It’s a portrait of a family who has become familiar in pages and onscreen. The author even thanks actor Russell Hornsby, who plays adult Maverick in The Hate U Give film, at the end for inspiring Maverick’s teenage story. The intersection continues with Maverick witnessing the aftermath of Dre’s murder similar to Starr witnessing the actual murder of her friend Khalil by a police officer. With Starr’s situation, we know the killer while Maverick is carrying the guilt of not knowing the killer. Maverick also finds himself alone in advocating for Dre, who falls out of the media cycle as another Black gang member murder victim unlike Starr who gets unwanted attention with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement spotlighting Khalil’s murder by police.

Angie Thomas and fellow multicultural young adult author Elizabeth Acevedo seem to be the top best-selling authors in the subgenre as evidenced in what literary agents say in Twitter pitch parties. But they both prioritize tropes among teens of color such as teen pregnancy in their novels. Though their stories show a realistic depth to the situation, this thread is becoming more common in YA literature when teen pregnancy rates are on the decline, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Concrete Rose, the author has other characters, particularly Maverick’s extended family, upset about him not having only one baby but two babies within months. Others vocalizing the disappointment sits heavy with Maverick that adds to the allure of earning more money illegally.

Overall, like its related novels in the Garden Heights universe, Concrete Rose flows with familiarity with the first-person narrative and shows a character’s true feelings about hardships associated with their surroundings.



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book reviews

Book Review: Chlorine Sky by Mahogany L. Browne

Chlorine Sky

Chlorine Sky by Mahogany L. Browne
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

*Given an advanced reading copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review*

Chlorine Sky by Mahogany L. Browne is a novel-in-verse featuring two Black girls engaged in a toxic friendship that is hanging on a thread, but the verse and the story fail to strike a chord.

Skyy, the main character’s name we learn on the last page, is a basketballer who feels less beautiful compared to other girls, especially her best friend Lay Li, who seems to be the most beautiful girl at school. Lay Li is a boy magnet while Skyy suppresses crushes on boys. So when Lay Li’s ex-boyfriend Shawn tries to get more information on her new boyfriend Curtis, Skyy disses Curtis. And like that Lay Li ignores Skyy like she ignores Shawn. In disbelief, Skyy works to get back in Lay Li’s good graces as she feels the pain of losing her best friend over a trivial situation. She can’t confide in Lay Li or her older sister Essa, who’s always mean, and she doesn’t see her cousin Inga, who’s always nice, enough. So she stays on the basketball court and falls for a boy named Clifton. They kiss, but Skyy feels sad that she can’t share this information with Lay Li. Days go by until Lay Li comes to Skyy to share her very different experience with Clifton.

The novel-in-verse is becoming a genre that literary agents want to boost in the industry. Except it’s difficult to tell a sufficient story that fits into a novel in verse. This book’s verse is borderline mediocre, some good parts but mostly so-so parts as in the combination of words are not impressive. For grammar geeks, the paragraph breaks aren’t placed in the best spots with ampersands starting at lines and capitalization is not used enough. For visual geeks, the cover is beautiful with the oranges and navy blues around a Black girl trying to find herself while rescuing a friendship.

Overall, the book is short but not as sweet as expected. The story has familiar elements with the athletic girl being best friends with the fashionable girl. Opposites attract, but in high school the athletic girl feels inferior to the fashionable girl because of the heightened attention on what is classified as beauty. And beauty means everything in adolescence when boys are in the picture, especially when the boys are the ones creating the division between the female friendships.

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what's lit

Author Natasha Diaz Wants Us to Know Black Jewish Stories Matter

When Natasha Díaz discovered her debut novel was excluded from a Black Jewish book list, she went to Twitter to air her frustrations that led to a conversation on multiracial Jewish literature.

Natasha’s young adult novel Color Me In features a sixteen-year-old protagonist who moves in with Black mother’s family after her parents divorce, but her White Jewish father wants to throw her a belated bat mitzvah. The change in surroundings and circumstances heightens the racial and religious intolerance, according to the publisher Penguin Random House imprint Ember, but the teenager who’s usually quiet tries to find her voice amid the noise. On her author website, she says the book is “inspired by my experiences as a white passing, multiracial woman.”

In June, Natasha tweeted she had submitted the book that was first published in 2019 to the Association of Jewish Libraries for inclusion in its list of Black Jewish literature in light of the George Floyd protests. She said the association refused to add her book to the list.

The Association of Jewish Libraries created a list that includes the YA best-seller Little & Lion by Brandy Colbert, which comes from Little, Brown & Co. Books for Young Readers about a Black girl who’s trying to deal with her White Jewish stepbrother’s mental illness. The list is the seventh installment in the association’s Love Your Neighbor series, an initiative to promote works by Jewish authors in the aftermath of the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue mass shooting in Pittsburgh.

By mid-June, Natasha started a campaign asking for followers to amplify Black Jewish writers whether they were published or unpublished. Within two months, she penned the article “What It’s Like to Be a Black Jewish Writer” in Alma, a digital media outlet focused on pop culture content about Jewish women.

I never read a character who was grappling with where to fit, how to own her whole self, and also how to take accountability for white presenting privilege, in a book. Yes, it’s a lot, but it’s my life, and while I was so incredibly proud to learn my book was “a first,” I couldn’t help but also feel infinitely sad that my Black Jewish experience, which is so impacted by my proximity to whiteness, is the only one to travel through the traditional publishing channels and represent young Black Jews in children’s literature.

In the article, she has a roundtable discussion that includes Marra Gad, the author of the award-winning memoir The Color of Love: A Story of a Mixed-Race Jewish Girl from Agate Publishing, and Rachel Harrison-Gordon, the filmmaker behind Broken Bird about a Black Jewish girl preparing for her bat mitzvah. Also in August, Natasha was interviewed by the Jewish Book Council and discussed her book’s impact.

Perhaps one of the most visible Black Jewish authors is Rebecca Walker, the daughter of writing legend Alice Walker, who wrote about her multiethnic upbringing in her first memoir, Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, published by Penguin Random House in 2002. Rebecca is the author and editor of seven books, including a debut novel called Adé: A Love Story, originally published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co. and Amazon Publishing Co. in 2013. A year later, pop icon Madonna was set to direct a film based on the book.

Meanwhile, Natasha continues to discover and elevate multiracial and Black Jewish writers on social media who still battle deep-rooted hatred from within the White Jewish community and antisemitism outside the community.

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what's lit

How Moments of Racial Tension Are Shaping YA Literature

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Six well-known Black female authors with best-selling credentials came together to announce their joint project of a young adult novel surrounding the 2003 New York City blackout. Though the collaboration is a publisher dream, it also shows how moments of racial tension particularly in recent U.S. history are the moneymaking moves for authors of color to get their literary voices out into the world.

Angie Thomas of The Hate U Give, Tiffany D. Jackson of Grown, Nic Stone of Dear Martin, Nicola Yoon of Everything, Everything; Dhonielle Clayton of The Belles, and Ashley Woodfolk of The Beauty That Remains are teaming up for Blackout. The collection of six interconnected stories that will “bring the glowing warmth and electricity of Black teen love to this interlinked novel of charming, hilarious, and heartwarming stories that shine a bright light through the dark,” according to publisher HarperCollins Publishers and its imprint Quill Tree Books. The book’s release date is June 22, 2021.

Mistaken for terrorism almost two years after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the Northeast blackout of 2003 was a massive power outage that crippled the East Coast, most notably New York City. This sent hundreds of thousands of people to the streets after many had been evacuated off the largest public transportation system or had left their vehicles since traffic lights weren’t working. With the dark atmosphere on a ninety-degree day in August, unease took over some areas as ambulances raced to destinations and people stole merchandise. Race and youth naturally became a concern.

Making race and youth the main elements in a young adult novel seems to be more common now, especially with the contributions of the aforementioned authors. Angie Thomas rose to literary fame when The Hate U Give explored the theme of unarmed Black boys being shot by police or racists as did Nic Stone’s Dear Martin. Another recent example includes Christina Hammonds Reed’s debut novel The Black Kids, which revolves around the 1992 Los Angeles uprising and includes a mention of the 1921 Black Wall Street massacre. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air star Karyn Parsons recently spoke about her middle grade novel How High the Moon, which revolves around the 1944 George Stinney Jr. execution.

These historical events impacting Black communities were rarely taught in school but are seeing a resurgence in mentions amid the anti-racism movement. As students are learning from their homes, some YA authors of color like Dhonielle Clayton and Kelly Yang are speaking to classrooms via Zoom though they said they dealt with racial discrimination.

YA literature, particularly for children of color, is evolving to be a supplemental lesson on race and youth that will take moments from the not-so-distant past and use character voices to convey those missing perspectives.

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘Punching the Air’ by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam

Punching the AirPunching the Air by Ibi Zoboi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I say
That maybe
I was punching
All the walls
They put around me
Around us

I was punching
The air
The clouds
The sun


Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five illustrates a heart-wrenching portrayal of a Black teen boy trying to find what joy he has left in juvenile hall after being accused of putting a White teen boy into a coma.

Amal is a regular sixteen-year-old Black boy growing up in New York when he finds himself in a courtroom fighting charges that he put a White boy from another neighborhood into a coma. He gets sent to juvie, where he taps his artistic and poetic ability as best as he can, but he’s deterred at every corner. The other boys are volatile and the adults are judgmental. Poetry class is his only outlet, but Amal struggles with the work the instructor wants him to put into his poems. Then his artistry clicks for him, and this leads to him repainting a mural in the common area where the boys meet up with their families. Amal becomes known as “Young Basquiat,” a tribute to Jean-Michel Basquiat, until that morsel of happiness is taken away from him, and his life seems to be precariously hanging in the balance again.

The entire story is told in verse. This young adult novel differs from others exploring the racial justice movement since the main character is in actual custody and his freedom depends solely on what a White boy says, only if he wakes up from his coma. How a Black boy’s life depends on a White boy’s testimony shows readers the racial dynamics even kids are dealing with. They had gotten into a fight that went too far. Amal says he didn’t throw the harmful blow that put Jeremy in a coma. The boys don’t know each other because Amal and his friends crossed over the physical boundaries of their neighborhood that separate Black and White families with markers of housing, education, resources, and opportunities.

Mental health is a major theme. One way Amal tries to stay grounded is through his Islamic faith. It’s refreshing to see a Black Muslim teen in a young adult novel because the religion is rarely seen in the genre, and when it is, it seems to belong to a Middle Eastern kid instead. Amal’s faith ties him to his mother, who reminds him to pray five times a day. He knows he stands out as a devout Muslim in juvie, and his faith remains under threat inside those gray walls behind bars. Amal also struggles with his poetry and art in the dreary environment. The story examines the power of art for youth since it represents healthy expression. When art is taken away by adults to cause detriment, a teen’s mental health could deteriorate, especially if they’re in a situation like juvie.

Overall, the novel dives into a serious issue of incarcerated teens and those teens looking for any glimpse of bright light they can capture to strengthen themselves. The co-author Yusef Salaam was one of the five Black and Latino teen boys found guilty in the Central Park jogger rape case in 1989. Salaam and Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise are now considered the Exonerated Five after they were exonerated in 2002 when the real rapist had been located through DNA testing. The novel is based on Salaam using his passion for art during his years behind bars also waiting for the truth to be revealed. That’s the most powerful aspect of this book: how race plays a part in who is trusted with the truth.

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what's lit

Author Couple Nicola and David Yoon Announce Forthcoming Imprint

Nicola and David Yoon. Publisher's Weekly.

The Sun Is Also a Star and Everything, Everything best-selling author Nicola Yoon will launch an imprint with her novelist husband.

With a 2022 debut date, Nicola and David Yoon, the best-selling author of Frankly in Love, plan to introduce Joy Revolution, an imprint dedicated to publishing young adult love stories written by and centering around people of color. Publishers Weekly broke the news on Thursday afternoon.

According to the literary publication, Joy Revolution will be overseen by Wendy Loggia, author and senior executive editor at Delacorte Press. The Yoons plan to partner with a Delacorte editor who has yet to be hired to acquire works for the imprint and shape its roster.

David Yoon’s sophomore young adult book, Super Fake Love Song, has a release date of Nov. 17. His adult debut, Version Zero, is coming out in May 2021.

Nicola’s books will continue to publish under Penguin Random House imprint Delacorte Press  and David’s under G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers.

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what's lit

Teen Magazine Posts Tweet Tagging Wrong Black YA Author

A magazine for teen girls mistakenly confused two Black young adult authors in a tweet that took six hours to come down.

Middle grade author Karen Strong chronicled the Twitter debacle on Sunday after noticing Girls’ Life Magazine had tweeted about a giveaway of the YA best-seller A Song Below Water by Bethany C. Morrow. Except the social media team behind the magazine’s account tagged the author as Dhonielle Clayton, also a well-known YA author.

Dhonielle tweeted that she didn’t write the fantasy YA novel. Bethany quote-tweeted the tweet.

The magazine deleted the original tweet and soon put out a statement on the mishap.

Soon after the apology, the magazine posted a tweet similar to the original one with correcting the author’s name.

The mistake still resonated on book Twitter, especially among Black women writers, who said it’s another example of legitimate media outlets not tagging the correct Black person, in this case the author as Bethany C. Morrow whose name is on the cover.

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what's lit

#PublishingPaidMe Reveals Pay Discrepancies Between Black and White Writers

Going into the third week of protests over the police killing of George Floyd, book Twitter went down another road in revealing the racial bias in publishing.

A Blade So Black and A Dream So Dark author L.L. McKinney started the #PublishingPaidMe Twitter hashtag on Saturday to invite White authors to share the advances they received on their books to give Black authors insight on what they received for theirs.

Writer’s Digest shares this definition of an advance versus a royalty:

An advance is a signing bonus that’s negotiated and paid to the author before the book is published. It’s paid against future royalty earnings, which means that for every dollar you receive in an advance, you must earn a dollar from book sales before you start receiving any additional royalty payments.

Though L.L. tweeted she made the hashtag to discover numbers from only White authors, Black authors and other authors of color decided to share their numbers.

One author is Dhonielle Clayton. Her debut fantasy young adult novel The Belles that published in 2018 is seen as inspiration in the multicultural fantasy YA genre. She shared she only received a $45,000 advance for her book though it was in one of the hottest genres at the time amid the publishing industry’s alleged push toward diversity and inclusion with adding more authors of color on their rosters and books featuring characters of color.

In a quote tweet from White YA novelist Laura Sebastian, Zoraida Córdova, who also writes fantasy YA, said she received $7,500 for Labyrinth Lost, which features Latinx characters inspired by her Ecuadorian roots. She added it’s her best-selling book yet. Laura, the author behind the Ash Princess series, tweeted she had received six-figure deals for each book in each of her three trilogies, the next two with debut novels set for 2021.

Laura later tweeted she received backlash for putting up such high numbers and was accused of distributing “sexual favors.” Battling the sexism online, she added she wanted to be an ally and share her reality.

Myriam Gurba, the queer Chicana memoirist behind Mean and the main campaigner to spread awareness on Jeanine Cummins’ White narrative version of the Mexican immigration story in the best-seller American Dirt, said she just earned $3,000 for Mean.

Nigerian-American novelist Nnedi Okorafor who specializes in literature highlighting Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism said she wouldn’t share her numbers but offered the alternative of not taking advances and just receiving royalties. From her tweet, she implies that royalties put more money in her hands in the long run, especially for her award-winning novella trilogy Binti.

The #PublishingPaidMe hashtag is an eye-opening account of how authors who are not White and cisgender may be lowballed for their work, the work readers pay for and check out from libraries, actions that produce a lot of money for publishers.

This conversation may trigger a long-term movement in the publishing industry, where publishers have the opportunity to divide budgets more equally instead of basing sale projections on the myth that diverse stories don’t sell well. Even with the success of books such as Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give and Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, that myth still lingers, especially when these Black authors and very few others made news with their advances.

Jesmyn Ward, who won the National Book Award twice, tweeted Monday that her publisher did not want to give her $100,000 for her next book after Salvage the Bones received the award.

Mary Karr, Robinne Lee, and Lilliam Rivera were a few of the authors to respond to Jesmyn’s claims. In a series of tweets, Jesmyn clarifies how her other works fared like Men We Reaped and Sing, Unburied, Sing, which was her first book to earn a $100,000 advance.

L.L. added in multiple tweets that there will be continuation in the discussion where Black authors will be asked to share information.

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what's lit

YA Author Kimberly Jones Explains Civil Unrest Logic in Viral Video

A young adult author’s video interview discussing how race, socioeconomic status, and history are the root of the latest civil unrest has gone viral.

Kimberly Jones, the co-author of the young adult novel I’m Not Dying With You Tonight along with Gilly Segal, passionately spelled out why people are protesting, rioting, or looting after the Memorial Day death of George Floyd, who was killed by police officers in Minneapolis. His death has sparked nationwide civil unrest as the U.S. slowly comes out of the COVID-19 quarantine.

In a George Floyd tribute T-shirt, Kimberly says she supports both viewpoints from Black people saying they don’t want rioting or looting in our communities and they don’t want to support mainstream White-centric businesses. She then breaks down the difference between protestors, rioters, and looters—a definition that the media struggles with in its reporting, which leads to people misunderstanding the situation such as in the example with the Red Sofa Literary Agency founder who called police on people she classified as looters last month.

“Let’s ask ourselves why in this country in 2020 the financial gap between poor Blacks and the rest of the world is at such a distance that people feel like their only hope and only opportunity to get some of the things that we flaunt and flash in front of them all the time is to walk through a broken glass window and get it,” Kimberly says in the video.

“But they are so hopeless that getting that necklace, getting that TV, getting that change, getting that bed, getting that phone, whatever it is they’re going to get because in that moment when riots happen and they present an opportunity of looting that’s their only opportunity to get it. We need to be questioning that. Why are people that poor? Why are people that broke? Why are people that food-insecure, that clothing-insecure?”

What also helped the video go viral is her Monopoly comparison to how economics work in America.

“If I right now decided to play Monopoly with you and for four hundred rounds of playing Monopoly, I didn’t allow you to have any money,” she says, pointing to the four centuries that Black people have been in the U.S. dealing with injustice after injustice. “I didn’t allow you to have anything on the board. I didn’t allow for you to have anything. And then we play another fifty rounds of Monopoly and everything that you gained and you earned while playing that round of Monopoly was taken from you.

“That was Tulsa, that was Rosewood. Those were places we built Black economic wealth, and we were self-sufficient. We owned our stores. When we owned our property. And they burned them to the ground.”

She refers to the race massacres in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921 and Rosewood, Florida in 1923 in which White mobs destroyed thriving Black communities. Descendants of people who were impacted by those massacres are calling for reparations.

In a tweet, Kimberly wrote, “I just took the time to go through the first hundred or so responses in this thread and I am FLOORED! The support is so welcome and overwhelming.”

https://twitter.com/kimlatricejones/status/1269275215663685635

Titled “How Can We Win,” the video interview is on YouTube via David Jones Media and has a timestamp of being posted on June 1 and the interview conducted on May 31. David Jones wrote in the video’s summary:

“On day two, Sunday the 31st, he activated his dear friend author Kimberly Jones to tag along and conduct interviews. During a moment of downtime he captured these powerful words from her and felt the world couldn’t wait for the full length documentary, they needed to hear them now.”

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Matthew A. Cherry, who recently received the golden Oscar statue for his six-minute film and accompanying book Hair Love illustrated by Vashti Harrison, shared the video on June 5.

Authors like Angie Thomas and Jason Reynolds were quick to point out that Kimberly is a Black author who deserves the support with the purchase of her book. Harper Collins Publishers’ Epic Reads even chimed in.

According to the book’s description, “I’m Not Dying with You Tonight follows two teen girls―one Black, one White―who have to confront their own assumptions about racial inequality as they rely on each other to get through the violent race riot that has set their city on fire with civil unrest.”

The video is approaching half a million views on YouTube.

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what's lit

Quarantine Life Lessons From Nicola Yoon’s ‘Everything, Everything’

With most of the U.S. population under some type of stay-at-home measure, it may feel like we’re Madeline Whittier from Nicola Yoon’s 2015 blockbuster young adult novel Everything, Everything. The 17-year-old character stays home her entire life after her doctor mother diagnosed her with severe combined immunodeficiency, meaning she’s allergic to pretty much everything.

Maddy’s illness keeps her indoors all day every day. Her mother takes every precaution to make sure Maddy’s bubble stays clean, with the assistance of Maddy’s home nurse Carla. But once Maddy lays eyes on her new neighbor Olly outside her bedroom window, she questions the lifestyle her mother put her in after her father and younger brother died years before.

Since Maddy stayed inside for 17 years, she has moments in the book that reflect on what many may be experiencing now amid the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.

KEEP THE CONSTANT ONLINE INTERACTION

At the start of the chapter “Secrets,” Maddy expresses how her online communication is reducing her sleep: “My constant IMing with Olly is catching up with me. I fall asleep during not one but two movie nights with my mom. She begins worrying that something’s wrong, that my immune system is compromised somehow.”

As Maddy and Olly mostly depend on online interaction, they exhibit the qualities many people are feeling now with using social media like Instagram Live and videoconferencing tools like Zoom to stay in touch because they can’t see each other in person. Authors are using IG Live to read their works, give writing lessons, and interview each other. Book clubs have found refuge with Zoom to keep their book selections on schedule and continue or start face-to-face meetings.

MAKE FANCY HOME-COOKED DINNERS

The “Menteuse” chapter describes the dinner traditions between Maddy and Pauline, which sometimes include Carla. “Everything at Friday Night Dinner is French. The napkins are white cloth embroidered with fleur-de-lis at the edges. The cutlery is antique French and ornate. We even have miniature silver la tour Eiffel salt and pepper shakers.”

She goes on about how Pauline likes to make cassoulet, “a French stew with chicken, sausage, duck, and white beans.” Except their cassoulet only contains the white beans because of Maddy’s allergies.

One of the conversations that keeps coming up online during the coronavirus isolation is people are either learning to cook or taking pleasure in cooking their own meals. To dress up dinner night, incorporate a theme to keep spirits high at least once a week for yourself or your family.

EXAMINE STRANGE DREAMS

In “My White Balloon,” Maddy describes a dream she had about the house breathing in line with her. On an inhale, walls collapse, but on an exhale, they expand.

According to the World Economic Forum, a sleep expert says the reportedly high rate of vivid dreams people are having during the coronavirus lockdown may be due to information and emotional overload. Maddy is having similar dreams early on in the book when she first sees Olly, which revs her up to find out more about him and how to communicate with him.

MOVE THROUGH THE BOOKSHELF

In “Madam, I’m Adam,” Maddy tells us she returns to a lot of her favorite books: “Sometimes I reread my favorite books from back to front. I start with the last chapter and read backward until I get to the beginning. When you read this way, characters go from hope to despair, from self-knowledge to doubt.”

If you have an obsession to outpace your book consumption with buying more books before finishing most of the ones already on your shelf, then this may be the perfect time to make a dent in your home readership. With physical libraries closed, it makes us value the books we own and revisit the ones we love. More people, not really bibliophiles, have done Marie Kondo makeovers on their bookshelves, so bulking up a skimpy bookshelf can still be done with supporting independent bookstores and checking out library e-books through a mobile device.

Everything, Everything was also made into a motion picture in 2017, starring Amandla Stenberg, Anika Noni Rose, and Nick Robinson.

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘Frankly in Love’ by David Yoon

Frankly in Love (Frankly in Love, #1)Frankly in Love by David Yoon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Frankly in Love by David Yoon, young adult author Nicola Yoon’s husband, is an intricate fictional first-person narrative from a Korean teen boy trying to overcome the subtle racism he was taught because he now finds himself liking a girl he knows his parents would never approve.

Frank Li is a first-generation Korean American teen living in Orange County, California. He starts falling for Brit Means, a white girl at his school. But he knows his strict Korean parents won’t be having that. They even practically disowned their older daughter, who attended Harvard and became an investment banker like she was groomed to do, but to them she canceled all her success by marrying a black man. Even with his best friend Q Lee, who’s black, Frank knows his parents aren’t the most comfortable with Q though they swear they love him like another son because he’s not like “other black people.” With that in his head, Frank decides to recruit his friend, Joy Song, who’s not only Korean but her parents are friends with Frank’s parents, to be his fake girlfriend. She also is hiding who she’s dating, a Chinese boy she knows her parents won’t approve of. While Frank invites Brit to his house with other friends, Brit doesn’t know about the ploy and falls deeper for her new boyfriend. After they exchange “I love you,” Frank is having doubts that he picked the right girl after all.

Frank’s voice is authentic with the constant worrying over race and how his hormones are leading him to someone outside his race then within his race but not within his income bracket. He struggles with how his immigrant parents racially profile everyone like many parents do, especially taking into consideration their American experience and what their parents taught them. The book does a good job in this mental back-and-forth of surveying the meaning of race around the character and seeing it affecting his life in a bad way yet not knowing how to avoid it. His internal monologue, though on the long side, shows what a lot of teens are coping with when it comes to relationships and their parents possibly not being supportive only because of the race of the partner they choose.

Some book reviews discuss the book’s length, and yes it’s too long and has the character going through a lot during his senior year on top of worrying about his love life, dealing with his parents, and trying to get into college. The beginning of the book is very long with over-describing his life and that same rhythm returns at the end, as in there are few times you think the book will end but it keeps going. It needed better editing when it came to length.

Overall, the book handles mixed-race relationships among teens well and how even today they may be dealing with heavier racial issues because they’re hearing their parents discuss race in a negative way. In this book, Frank becomes a bit obsessed analyzing race in his world, but he’s developing his viewpoints around cultural expectations and trying to figure out love in the process. Also listened to this story on audiobook where the narrator’s voice works except when he did the girls’ voice, which came out comical, but it’s a likeable audio read.

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what's lit

Ibi Zoboi Talks Writing Process With Yusef Salaam in New YA Book

Award-winning young adult author Ibi Zoboi and Dr. Yusef Salaam shared their writing process on their upcoming YA book.

On Instagram Live Wednesday, Ibi explained how she infused her writing into Yusef’s poetry in Punching the Air. It tells the story of 16-year-old Amal Shahid, a Black Muslim teen pursuing poetry and art, who finds himself in prison after “an altercation in a gentrifying neighborhood escalates into tragedy,” according to the publisher HarperCollins Publishers.

During the video chat, Ibi wore a T-shirt printed with art by Yusef that he named “Born Brave” and had designed while wrongfully convicted for seven years over the 1989 rape of a White female jogger. He was a part of the Central Park Five, the group of four Black teens and one Latino teen blamed for the infamous crime. They became known as the Exonerated Five after filmmaker Ava DuVernay brought their story to Netflix last year in When They See Us. The group was exonerated in 2002 after the identity of the real rapist was discovered. Yusef was 15 when he went to jail.

While in jail, Yusef found ways to create art and poetry with the tools he could find like a pin in his clothes.

“Art is a completely liberating meditative process,” he said in the chat. “When you get the opportunity to delve into it and be free with it, you don’t really know where it’s going to go. And the beauty of it is when you finish coming out of the meditation and see what you’ve created, it’s like, ‘Wow.'”

Attendees were allowed to ask questions, and the first question focused on how Ibi and Yusef co-wrote the book.

“I’m the writer and Yusef is the storyteller in this situation,” Ibi said. “It was collaborative in the storytelling process, and I could not have written this book without Yusef’s input and Yusef’s history and Yusef’s mindset.”

She said while Yusef was busy promoting When They See Us she was hard at work. “While he was doing that, I was typing away and really having conversations with him, so in that sense he was the storyteller and I was the writer and transcriber, and Yusef was giving me ideas.”

Though they didn’t go into detail about the specific crime that leads Amal to trouble, the co-authors said the crime is inspired by their upbringings in segregated 1980s New York. They also said they didn’t want to apply Yusef’s real story to the novel.

Ibi and Yusef said they were inspired by the 1989 murder of Yusuf Hawkins, a Black teen, who was killed by a White teen mob in the predominantly White section of Bensonhurst in Brooklyn after inquiring about a car for sale with his friends. His group was mistaken for another group going to a birthday party of a girl one of the White boys had a relationship with.

The authors also recalled the Jena Six case of six Black teens in Jena, Louisiana who had beaten a White classmate in 2006. The incident followed a Black teen at their local high school trying to sit in a part of the courtyard reserved for White kids. The Jena Six received attention from civil rights leaders after they had been heavily charged with attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Since this incident occurred before social media took off, Ibi said we tend to have a collective amnesia about racially charged events.

“I was scared to write this story, but I knew I could lean on you,” Ibi told Yusef. “I couldn’t have never written this story without you at all. One of things I asked you is whether or not you were OK with me as a woman telling this story and do you remember what you told me?”

“Absolutely,” Yusef said. “I don’t remember exactly what I told you, but there’s a certain power from a woman telling a story that can’t be not from a woman. I’m thinking about my mother as a nurturer. I’m thinking about Ava DuVernay as a master storyteller, who can take something out of the world …. I want to say I was so blessed to be able to have you in that space.”

Ibi and Yusef met in 1999 while they were both attending Hunter College in New York. American Street, Ibi’s debut novel, was a National Book Award finalist. She also wrote the YA novel Pride, a Pride and Prejudice remix, and the middle grade novel My Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich. She edited the YA anthology Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America.

Punching the Air is being recommended to readers who like Jason Reynolds, who made an appearance in the Instagram Live stream, along with fellow YA novelist Nic Stone.

The book is scheduled to come out Sept. 1. The authors said in the chat that they plan to do a book tour, but no news yet on if it will be in-person or virtual.

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘On the Come Up’ by Angie Thomas

On the Come Up by Angie Thomas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

On the Come Up by Angie Thomas follows a teenage girl through her rise in the local rap game as she learns to navigate her emotions around a traumatic event at her high school. Like Angie’s debut novel The Hate U Give, this story features a black teen girl trying to overcome obstacles in the fictional Garden Heights.

The daughter of the late rap legend Lawless, Bri is 16 and hungry to jump-start her rap career. Her Aunt Pooh becomes her unofficial agent by hooking Bri up with a chance at the main rap battle competition in the city. Once she steps up into the ring, Bri feels her nerves until the rapper across from her, Milez, disses her father. She never knew her father, but she knows he deserves the respect of every rapper in Garden Heights. She transfers that anger into her rhymes, emerging as the winner. She soon learns her competitor is the son of Lawless’ manager, Supreme. And Supreme sees the opportunity to make Bri a star. While riding the wave of future stardom, Bri is slammed against the floor at her school by two white security guards. As one of a few students of color at the historically white performing arts school, Bri knows she walks in those hallways with her skin color being seen as a threat. She takes that frustration and puts it into a song. Aunt Pooh warns Bri not to release that faux gangster front song, but when Aunt Pooh disappears, Bri decides to upload the song online. It goes viral but brings up a lot of negative attention Bri was not ready for.

The story is a great follow-up to The Hate U Give with a magnified focus on hip-hop and the lifestyles the musicians feel they have to assume due to stereotypes. Bri lives in the black underdeveloped neighborhood of Garden Heights with her Aunt Pooh, who’s in the gang Garden Disciples, and her father being murdered in the streets while at the top of his game because he was faking the lifestyle of being a hardened, weapon-strapped gangster. The juxtaposition of knowing who you are and knowing who others think you are follows Bri while other characters like Bri’s mother Jayda and Milez try to rise above the stereotypes. The school incident is unfortunately becoming viral with many kids of color being thrown to the ground by a white teacher or staffer over a disciplinary issue. Again, Angie weaves a racially charged issue into her book like the shootings of unarmed black people in The Hate U Give.

Overall, this is another hypnotic read from the author that dives deep into a realistic story that’s rare to find in today’s young adult literature.

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘Viva Durant and the Secret of the Silver Buttons’ by Ashli St. Armant

Viva Durant and The Secret of the Silver ButtonsViva Durant and The Secret of the Silver Buttons by Ashli St. Armant
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“Viva Durant and The Secret of the Silver Buttons” by Ashli St. Armant is an imaginative girl detective story that combines music and mystery. An interview with the author will be available soon at shelit.com.

Visiting from California, Viva Durant is a teen girl who arrives in New Orleans bored by her grandmother’s seemingly simple life of running errands. Grams doesn’t want to explore New Orleans because she lives there, but Viva feels there’s so much mystique in the city that she has to explore the most exciting parts like the French Quarter. One day, Grams gives Viva a newspaper to read where Viva discovers an article about a man looking for his great-aunt’s secret treasure that could be worth a lot of money. What sticks out to Viva is the man saying the Miss Mary Mack nursery rhyme is about his ancestor and the rhyme has clues about where the treasure is, but he needed help analyzing the lyrics to crack the code. Intrigued by the backstory, Viva uses her trips into the city for Grams’ shopping list to head to various landmarks to string together the clues about “Miss Mary Mack.”

The music is creatively blended into the story during pivotal moments, especially in between chapters. Giving a history to the Miss Mary Mack rhyme on top of making it into a treasure hunt spells out an entertaining audiobook. There are moments where it feels like the mystery will stop with a questionable clue, but Viva moves forward with the clue anyway and finds better clues that bring her closer to the secret location of the silver buttons. The narrator, Bahni Turpin, also delivers the best rhythm for the childish voice of Viva.

Overall, the audiobook is perfect for a girl, especially a girl of color, interested in mystery and history.

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what's lit

Women Authors Attack Sarah Dessen Critic in Social Media Uproar

Burst

This past week, young adult author Sarah Dessen tweeted a quote from a college article by a woman who campaigned against her books in a campus reading program years ago. Many authors including Roxane Gay and Siobhan Vivian came to Sarah’s defense—until fans clapped back when the woman was being called derogatory names by top women authors. The authors backpedaled with some Twitter users accusing Sarah of white female victimhood and the authors of attacking readers with opinions on their works.

As of the weekend, the discriminatory tweets have disappeared from top authors’ Twitter feeds, including Siobhan Vivian, author of YA book We Are the Wildcats, who tweeted “Fuck that fucking bitch” about the quoted woman with Sarah saying “I love you” back.

Dhonielle Clayton, author of multicultural fantasy YA novel The Belles and co-founder of We Need Diverse Books, called the quoted woman a “raggedy ass fucking bitch.” Tiffany Jackson, author of YA novels Allegedly and Monday’s Not Coming, agreed. Siobhan’s Twitter account doesn’t exist anymore and her professional website has been made private, and Dhonielle’s account, which was very active with thousands of followers and tweets, now only has tweets from Nov. 14.

The Nov. 12 article in question came from The Aberdeen News on Northern State University’s Common Read program. Brooke Nelson, now a master’s degree student, says in the article:

“She’s fine for teen girls. But definitely not up to the level of Common Read. So I became involved simply so I could stop them from ever choosing Sarah Dessen.”

Brooke, according to the article, helped with the 2017 selection, which became Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, a memoir by a civil rights lawyer in pursuit of justice which will be a movie starring Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx. Sarah’s 2016 novel Saint Anything was in the running, a Vulture article reported. After Sarah mentioned the criticism in the infamous now-deleted tweet, the university issued an apology on Twitter in support of Sarah and against the free speech of an alum. Even the reporter apologized for adding the quote.

https://twitter.com/kgrandstrandAAN/status/1194307799385300998?s=20

The Washington Post was one of the first news outlets to see the Twitter feud unfold. The reporter interviewed Brooke, who said the quote was taken out of context with her emphasizing she didn’t think Sarah’s book was appropriate as a top book for her college crowd, and asked for her input:

Nelson, for her part, said she hopes the controversy draws more people to read books that will encourage them to think critically about pressing social issues.

“If anything comes out of this larger conversation,” Nelson told The Post, “I hope it is that others will make it a point to read books like [‘Just Mercy’] that push them beyond their usual perspective and challenge their assumptions of society.”

https://twitter.com/sarahdessen/status/1195431073892749315

https://twitter.com/rgay/status/1195405484905250817

https://twitter.com/pronounced_ing/status/1195742500369162240

https://twitter.com/jodipicoult/status/1195744857047928840

https://twitter.com/jenniferweiner/status/1195470675034685441

https://twitter.com/nkjemisin/status/1195745641768652800

Not everybody is going to like your book. And sometimes like in Sarah’s case, your book may be heavily scrutinized in some scenarios, even in a small-town news story about a small-town university’s book program. This comes with the territory.

Also, this story shows even as outspoken writers you have to be careful about what you decide to share publicly. Social media is an important asset to connecting with fans and readers, and now some of the authors involved have chosen to start over or take a break while most just deleted the first tweet in support of Sarah and tweeted an apology instead.

Ignore the haters if you don’t have anything nice to say; if it’s threatening in any way, then report the tweet and block the user, but just breathe when you see something constructive that you don’t like. Let it go, and if someone asks about the criticism, don’t respond or say something diplomatic because at the end of the day not everyone is going to like your work and they have the right to say so.

The unfortunate Twitter saga has some followers promoting a boycott, so we’ll keep a watch on how the authors involved will be impacted. Earlier this year, Netflix announced making three of Sarah’s novels into films.

https://twitter.com/Felicity_M2/status/1195602749959933952

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘Children of Blood and Bone’ by Tomi Adeyemi

Children of Blood and Bone (Legacy of Orïsha, #1)

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


“Children of Blood and Bone” is an overhyped young adult fantasy that follows a stereotypical storyline with substandard writing and dialogue but shows the struggles of an oppressed people trying to fight the oppressor.

Zelie is a teenager who is conveniently training for battle in the beginning of the novel when she gets whisked in the ultimate battle for regaining magic for her people. Zelie comes from a line of maji, a group of people who had extraordinary powers that had been suppressed by the kingdom. Her mother and many other maji had been killed in the Raid years earlier. But when Amari, the crowned princess witnesses the death of her maji servant, she flees the castle with the one thing that could bring it back: a scroll. In her pursuit, she runs into Zelie, who has the maji marking of long white hair, to help her bring back magic for peace. They embark on a long journey with Zelie’s brother, Tzain, while Amari’s brother, Inan, follows their moves with his army to make sure magic never comes back.

First of all, the story doesn’t come off as unique and one of the reasons why is the turning point of the masked princess escaping her castle walls — which she never had done before — to save magic. That’s been in too many stories and films. The characters are undeveloped with Amari, for example, avenging her servant Binta’s death as her only reason to go on the journey. The death is the only memory that comes up, along with Zelie’s memory of her mother’s death. The repetitiveness of these same memories impeded character complexity since it seemed like they didn’t really have any others. Zelie, Amari, and Inan get chapters while Tzain never does because he’s reduced to the supportive brother though he’s on the same journey.

The most interesting character is Inan because he’s conflicted with pleasing his father, the king who lost his previous family to a war with maji, and his realization that he himself is evolving into a maji. He goes back and forth while Zelie and Amari remain boring, especially Zelie who relatively stays the same throughout the story with finding confidence that she’ll save her people then losing that confidence and going back and forth with this. On the other hand, Amari starts weak then becomes stronger, but at the end her strength progress comes too quickly that it doesn’t seem authentic.

With the hype around this book, I wanted to love it. But honestly it was the first book in a long time where I kept falling asleep from boredom at all the battles that just become a blur. The writing is offensively simple with more focus on the story that’s too fast-paced with the characters and settings never really receiving the proper attention they should. The dialogue is atrocious, especially with the cursing. All the characters just keep cursing like they barely have any other words in their vocabulary. It’s pretty bad how many times the reader will come across “skies,” “gods,” and “dammit,” the last one seeming out of place with the setting. Though I’m not a big reader of fantasy YA, I do know when I read a great novel in the genre, and this is not it.



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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.

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