Books and Sensibility

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Diverse Reads

Tiffany Sly Lives Here by Dana L Davis

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Rating: unrated | 334 pages | Harlequin Teen Inknyard Press ?  | Contemporary | 05/01/2018

 I was really excited to read this book after hearing about it on the  Hey, YA podcast.  I firmly remember actress Dana L. Davis in the 2000s for being “that black lady” who showed up on TV shows in the early 2000s.  I was also interested in a book that deals with respectability politics and all the shades of the black experience.

Tiffany Sly has had it rough. After losing her mother to cancer this music-loving rocker girl is headed from Chicago to the mansions and private school of Simi Valley, California; to live with the wealthy and successful father she’s never met. Anthony Stone (get it ? Sly…Stone ? Get it ?)

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Mini Reviews: YA Summer Reading

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When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon

Just like it’s namesake,When Dimple Met Rishi has all the hallmarks of a 90’s rom-com and so much more. Taking place entirely during a web developer summer program, the plot felt a little claustrophobic at times, but the relationship was developed wonderfully. Both narrators on the audiobook give great performance, though Vikas Adams’ voice for Dimple had a tendency to sound shrill. This book is everything you’ve heard and I want this movie. I want it now. – ★★★★
Dear Martin by Nic Stone

After experiencing a violent encounter with the police, high school senior Justyce McAllister begins writing letters to Martin Luther King, Jr. to unpack his newly developed complex feelings about race and policing.  Dear Martin is definitely an important book because so few YA novels are explicitly written and marketed for black teen boys the way this book has been but the story left me wanting more. I was annoyed that the white love interest got to explain the complexities of race in America, the MLK portrayal felt sanitized and Justyce reads as younger and more naive than a 17-year-old from the hood at an elite boarding school about to study policy at Yale. Author Zetta Elliot has made some criticisms of this books portrayal of black women and I agree with a lot of what she says. I think Dear Martin would have made a great middle-grade book, but as a YA it felt like a missed opportunity for a more nuanced discussion. – ★★★ + .5

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Five Audiobooks For Pride Month

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June is audiobook month and Pride month, to celebrate here are five of our favorite YA audiobooks featuring gay, lesbian or bisexual protagonists. If you have audiobook recs with trans or asexual protagonist please leave below!…

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The Parking Lot Attendant by : Nafkote Tamirat

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Unrated | 225 pages | Henry Holt and Co| Literary Fiction | 3/13/18  

 The Parking Lot Attendant is this sort of unsettling literary novel about a teenage girl and her father living in Boston’s Ethiopian community. They are both introverted and reserved people who keep to themselves; their insulated lives are not perfect but it works. Until the unnamed teenage protagonist bonds with Ayale, a charismatic parking lot attendant who rules this part of Boston, the teen soon finds herself caught up in something bigger than herself. Throughout the book, she serves as an unreliable narrator as she lays out how she and her father ended up on the run and living in an isolated island community.

The book is well written and dives into a very specific world. There was this constant unnerving tone to the book where you kept waiting for something big to happen. Did I necessarily understand everything that was happening towards the end of this book ? Not really,  but I enjoyed learning about the Ethiopian culture and about the community in Boston.  There are a ton of inserting characters and I liked the how it presents the narrators’ father as this introverted and closed-off man who is being a father the best way he can. At first, it is so easy to find fault with him but as the book goes on you start to understand what kind of father he is.

Check out the audio review atAudioFile Magazine!

 

Non-fiction Mini Reviews: Survivors

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I’ve been on a little nonfiction kick and these two memoirs have a lot in common. They’re both by black women in their early 40s who were raised Catholic while living in predominantly white spaces. Both authors were victims of rape (though the circumstances and results were very different) and both use their platforms as a form of activism, so I thought it was fitting I reviewed them together.

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Little & Lion by Brandy Colbert

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Rating: 4 out of 5.

8 hours 12 mins | Hachette Audio | Contemporary YA | 08/08/2017

I’ll be honest, I’m not a big fan of “tough stuff stories about marginalized identities, so I’d been circling this book for a long time; assuming a book about a bisexual black Jewish teenager and her bipolar stepbrother would be a “the struggle” book. However, from the very first few lines of Alisha Wainwright’s narration, I was pulled into the vibrant world of 16-year-old Suzette as she returns to her artsy and eclectic West Coast community of friends and family after a year in boarding school. Colbert does an amazing job building Suzette’s world and I know it’s corny but Los Angeles is almost a character in this book.

But seriously, Imma need one of those LA street tacos.

Alisha Wainwright is a new narrator on the scene and her voice has this cool West coast vibe that brings Suzette’s first-person POV to life. Props to all the work Bahni Turpin and Robin Miles have been doing, but I ’m excited we are getting some newer and younger narrators for black characters to spice things up. Wainwright is probably best known by some YA fans as Maia in the Freeform show Shadowhunters. It’s so crazy to me that she fell into acting only a few years ago because she is so good in this, every line is filled with intention. Give her all the books. All of ’em.

The only thing I didn’t love about this book was the love triangle that shows up. It felt a little sloppy and out of left field but I do like how it all ended up.


 Little & Lion is a quiet story brimming with compelling characters and a captivating audiobook narrator.

I don’t know if Colbert is taking requests but there is a character in here named Emil Choi and I need him to get his own book.