YA contemporary. Teen Sana Kiyohara’s family moves from the US midwest to California, where she has to deal with a new and very different school environment, a new love interest, and her sneaking suspicion that her dad is having an affair. I have mixed feelings about this one. I like that it visibly weaves the micropolitics of race, ethnicity, and to a certain extent sexuality into its high school setting in a way that YA fiction so often fails to do. I think the story and writing are, overall, quite good. It did include more than a few situations of a sort that I find way cringier than most people would, some of which were quite central to the plot, which disrupted my enjoyment somewhat. It’s perhaps not my place to worry about this, but I did also wonder if maybe *how* said micropolitics were made present in the text could have been done differently, in that they seemed – and I could be totally mis-reading this, so please forgive me if I am – as if they were presented in such a way as to make them easily legible to young white readers, who are frequently oblivious to such things. And I get both in terms of pedagogy and in terms of the harsh realities of the publishing industry why one might do that, but I also think it makes for better writing and a better book to make privileged readers (like me) work for it more. Again, I may be off-base and unfair in that observation. I also had mixed feelings about how it was all resolved – the grand romantic gesture was clever and flowed from the rest of the story, but it still felt a bit pat in the way that grand romantic gestures as plot resolution devices so often do. And some of the conflict between the main character and her girlfriend’s friends felt like it went away too easily, and it would have felt more satisfying to see her do more of the hard work that I suspect it would have required. That said, I *did* really appreciate how the conflict within the main character’s family was resolved – I thought that was fascinating, powerful, and effective. Anyway, I’m not sure my ambivalence is entirely fair, as I suspect I would have been more willing to overlook some of my other concerns if it wasn’t for my quirky oversensitivity to certain kinds of cringey-ness, so if it sounds interesting to you, don’t let my reservations stop you.
Originally posted on Scott’s Goodreads.