Books and Sensibility

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Diverse Reads

Sam and Ilsa’s Last Hurrah

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Rating: 2 out of 5.

211 pages | Knopf Books For Young Readers | Contemporary | 4/10/2018

*sigh*

I’m sad to say this book was a huge disappointment. I’ve read and enjoyed nearly everything this duo has put out and I was so ready to like this but it was a hot mess.

18-year-old twins Sam and Ilsa are known for the dinner parties they host in their grandmother’s luxury rent-controlled Manhattan apartment. When their grandmother decides to finally sell, the twins host one last dinner party before everything changes. 

I honestly don’t want to spend too much time trashing this book. There are multiple Goodreads reviewsfor that. This book has one of the lowest Goodreads ratings I’ve ever seen and while I noticed that going in I also liked Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List--which most people hate.

Reading this felt like someone put Cohn and Levithan’s previous books through an algorithm and had a computer write this book.

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Pride By Ibi Zoboi

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Rating: unrated | 320 pages | Balzer + Bray| Contemporary | 9/18/18 

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Finding Yvonne by Brandy Colbert

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 Rating: unrated | 288 pages | Little Brown For Young Readers| Contemporary | 8/07/2018 

Finding Yvonne is a small slice-of-life story of a formerly ambitious and passionate violinist who has lost her spark for music.  Losing her passion is a big struggle for Yvonne because to her father– a  successful chef /restaurateur–and Warren, her potential boyfriend/ father’s sous chef, passion is everything. Then a fateful meeting with a pair of talented eclectic street musicians in Venice Beach sends Yvonne spiraling down a path that leads to inspiration, heartache, and possibly love.

My first thought on this book was that this was totally a book teenage me would have liked. Yvonne is a black middle-class girl who is learning to bake and loves food. I’ve been reading a lot of books with black girl protagonists from all sort of background and it’s made me realize just how limited the options were back when I was a teen.

One of my biggest pet peeves in YA is what I call the Jerk!Dad, where the Dad is a jerk for no apparent reason. Yvonne’s father manages to straddle the line and I’m glad we are starting to see more nuance in the YA dad department. Yvonne’s father is successful and supportive but he uses pot and work to keep barriers up between him and Yvonne.

Colbert does an amazing job of building the specific world and community her characters live with less than 300 pages.

Check out the audiobook review on AudioFile !

Let’s Talk About Love by Claire Kann

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Rating: unrated  | Swoon Reads | Contemporary New Adult | Release Date: 1/23/2018 

Let’s Talk About Love is an upbeat, modern romance-y novel that feels way more like millennial (Gen Z ?) women’s fiction than like a true romance.

Alice loves a pleasing aesthetic, her best friends and herself–asexuality and all.  When she meets her new co-worker the sweet, generous and soon-to-be teacher Takumi she finds herself on a journey to balances her smoldering attraction with her identity as asexual.

I think I basically agree with Carrie’s review on Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, this book has a lot of drama and angst that comes from characters not talking to each other but I also like following them around as they try to tackle this whole adulting thing.

Alice was recognizable as a young person today, she loves Tumblr, fandom, bingeing tv and making memories with her friends.

I personally had a hard time seeing this book as a romance because Takumi felt–to use a term Kat uses a lot–unknowable to me. Perhaps it’s because I’m used to romances where we get into the other characters but he never felt like a real person to me. He was just a little too perfect.

I Can’t Date Jesus: Love, Sex, Family, Race, and Other Reasons I’ve Put My Faith in Beyoncé

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Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

 6 hrs and 9 min | Simon & Schuster | Memoir/Essay Collection | 07/24/2018

This memoir caught my eye because well . . . how can you bypass a book with a subtitle like that? I wasn’t familiar with Arceneaux before, but he is a prolific pop culture writer who often writes about the intersection of being Black and gay.

 I’ve been kind of meh on memoirs by millennials lately*, particularly the ones around identity, because they feel like they are written specifically for the gaze of White liberal progressives. But Arceneaux’s stories are messier and have a personal authenticity that I enjoyed.

My favorite essays were the ones he wrote about his relationship to Catholicism and the importance of R&B music in his life. At first, it seemed like Beyoncé’s name was put in the title just to get clicks but once you get to his essay about Beyoncé it fell into place. 

Arceneaux reads the audiobook, and it didn’t 100% work for me. While it was great to hear his particular southern accent, his affect was flat and stilted at times.

I also just admire Arceneaux’s hustle to become the media personality he’s become. While he doesn’t address it directly,  there is an ongoing thread in the background of his essays about the years of hard work he put into building his career.

Arceneaux offers something new to the gay/pop culture essayist genre and I’m sure there will be many more books from him in the future.

 

*This review of Morgan Jenkins’ This Will Be My Undoinghits on a few  the issues I have with some of these millennial memoirs about identity

 

Mini Reviews : Women To Watch Out For

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