I think this book came to me through a book club I’m in and I’m glad because I loved it. I’m not quite sure why I love books about identity so much, but I do—it’s probably one of the reasons I like YA so much.
You Bring the Distant Near is, as I mentioned, all about identity. That is racial and ethnic identity, but also everything else that makes a girl who she is. It’s really about four girls—sisters and their daughters—but the mom/grandma has a few scenes that add a different perspective to the story.
We start off with Sonia, at eight years old in 1965. She and her sister, Tara, live with their parents in Ghana. In this scene, Sonia’s mother (Ranee) ruins a swimming race she was going to win, which reveals quite a bit about both of them. But then the book jumps forward to the mid-seventies, when the family moves to Queens. Both Sonia and Tara settle in well enough. Tara channels Marcia Brady to fit in as much as possible while Sonia embraces the feminist movement. Then they move to New Jersey, where Tara finally gets her official start in drama. The story jumps ahead two more years, when they are both nearing real adulthood, and continues until we see them married. Then we jump to 1998, where we meet Sonia’s daughter Chantal and Tara’s daughter Anna. Chantal is as American as can be and when Anna comes over from Mumbai to go to high school with her, it’s a real struggle for Anna because she’s used to life in India. By the end of the book, Chantal and Anna are grown but their futures are yet to be decided. Possibilities are everywhere.
Okay, having written all that, the theme of identity may not seem obviously present, but it’s absolutely crucial to everything that happens. Ranee is distrustful of anyone who isn’t Indian (preferably Bengali) or white, which is a challenge for her in Flushing, Queens. Sonia hates her mom’s racism and her restrictions that keep Sonia basically locked up in the apartment. Tara’s always looking for her identity by trying on different personas, Twiggy the British model and Marcia Brady to name a couple. She’s able to manipulate her accent how she wants. Both she and Sonia push against their mother’s idea of who they should be to be good Bengali girls. They fight against what they perceive as outdated traditions at their father’s funeral (I don’t know the right word), shocking all the Bengalis in attendance. When we get to Chantal and Anna, the struggle for identity is even stronger, particularly for Chantal because her father is black. But it’s there for Anna, too, who wants to hold on to her own Indian identity even when in America. The final question of identity comes into play with Ranee herself, an interesting surprise near the end of the story.
Although the story jumps ahead at several points (which I don’t always love), it’s told in chronological order and is easy to follow. And as I’ve implied above, the characters are all complex and interesting. I personally most identified with Sonia, but any reader should be able to find one of the girls to relate to. The character arcs are clear even if there isn’t a strong plot that spans the whole book (I don’t think one is necessary).
I think anyone who enjoys exploring identity will enjoy this book, but it will especially appeal to Indians and other people who have strong ties to countries other than the one they live in. It’s a well-told story.
I read this quiet book in just two days, which says something because my reading pace has slowed to a crawl at this point (I’m still 14 whole books behind on my Goodreads challenge).
I’ve already reviewed Rabb’s other book, Kissing in America, which I really liked. So I had high expectations for Cures for Heartbreak, her first.
This book originally came out in 2003, but Mackler revised it in 2018. She didn’t make major changes, but did upgrade it to fit with today’s technology a little better. One of my writing friends recommended the book to me because of the kissing in the beginning (it was relevant to a story I was writing). I’m glad she did, because I quite enjoyed the book.
This is fun collection of mostly urban fantasy stories centering on (duh) zombies or unicorns. It is framed as a competition between the two editors, where Team Zombie is led by Justine and Team Unicorn by Holly. There are twelve stories in the collection but I was only able to read ten of them due to a weird printing error (pages from one story later in the book replaced pages in two other stories earlier in the book). Not sure how that happened with a major publisher like Simon & Schuster, but okay…
This is a really interesting and unique book. It’s steeped in Mexican-America culture, but not really in a positive way—the main character, Julia, basically hates every aspect of it. To me this was interesting because one of the reasons she hates it is that she can’t navigate it well—she’s socially awkward, but not in the “standard” way (at least this was my take on it). No, she says and does the wrong thing for her culture, which might be okay in white American culture (though definitely not always).
This short book first came out eighteen years ago but it’s still relevant today. It’s (fairly obviously) about a girl who cuts herself.
This book is a collection of short stories set in various points of US history ranging from 1838 to 1984. The stories are all about girls bucking the system in some way, but those ways vary widely over the book. The stories are all realistic except for a couple that have some magical realism elements. The stories also run the gamut on the diversity spectrum, including girls of several different religions, several protagonists of color (and different ethnicities, too), at least one lesbian, one character in a wheelchair, and another on the autism spectrum.
Darius the Great Is Not Okay is a unique book. Darius is an American kid whose mother is from Iran and whose father is Teutonic stock, and he is under treatment for depression. You don’t see a lot of YA featuring boys of color with depression, so I was curious to see how this one would play out. Also, most of the book is set in Iran, which is cool—I’ve only personally encountered one other YA book set there (not that I’ve looked extensively, but still).
I’ve read a couple other books by Deb Caletti and liked them both. One thing I noticed is that the two I read (Stay and The Nature of Jade) were different from each other. So I didn’t know what to expect when I picked up Essential Maps for the Lost. I heard Caletti speak about this book with E. Lockhart last year at a library event so I knew it had something to do with mental illness, like both of the others I read. But the interesting thing is that I found this book very different from the other two. It felt more more literary, for one (not that the other two weren’t but this one seemed more so)—maybe even a little ethereal. I read it for my MFA so I had to study it after my first read through. On my first read, I actually found myself a little confused because there were a lot of characters and we were really deep in both of the main characters’ heads. But as I read through it a second time, everything seemed obvious and clear, so perhaps I just wasn’t paying full attention the first time I read it. Who knows.
I am still studying short stories for the MFA, and this was one of the few YA collections I’ve been able to find. So I wasn’t expecting too much—but it turns out the book is pretty awesome. I really liked several of the stories. A few were a little on the bland side, but there was only one that I didn’t care for. None of this should come as a big surprise given the names of the authors in this collection. Though the book’s 9 years old so it predates some of their biggest stardom (John Green, Cassandra Clare, and Holly Black especially).
Juliet Takes a
This is a book that came to me from one of those YA book clubs I belong to as I’d never heard of it. But I’m actually surprised there isn’t a little more hype around it because it’s very good and it’s got a believable badass girl in it. I guess historical fiction isn’t where it’s at right now.
First, I have to say that Dramarama plays heavily with stereotypes—namely Gay Best Friend and Theatre Geek. However, it’s not a bad thing at all because Lockhart brings both to life so effectively.
I like Downham but was a little hesitant about this one because I thought the premise sounded stressful. But I’d put it on my reading list for this MFA semester, so I cracked it open last week.