Books and Sensibility

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Contemporary YA

Girl on Trial by Kathleen Fine

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Trigger Warning : Sexual assault

I binged the first season of Freeform’s Cruel Summer because of its nostalgia, fast-pace, and intense storytelling that moves back and forth through time. Girl On Trial has a lot of the same elements. In the late 2010s, teenaged Emily is accused of causing the death of a young family. The story flashes between the trial and events from earlier that Fall when Emily befriends Hannah, a troubled girl with a wild streak.

Emily lives in a small Maryland town where everyone is trying their best to get by. The events that unfold involve class, peer pressure and the need to belong. Some painful truths are revealed towards the end that are shocking and hard to read about. It sort of caught me off guard. Overall, I thought it was a solid blend of contemporary YA and crime fiction.

This book was published by the small press CamCat Books. I’m curious to read more of their work.

Give Me a Sign by Anna Sortino

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This is a YA book that feels like a YA Book.

Lilah is hard of hearing and often feels stuck between the hearing and Deaf world. The one place she always feels at home is Camp Gray Wolf, a summer camp for the Deaf and blind community. This year she is returning as a camp counselor. Lilah quickly finds her place among the counselor’s warm (and sometimes contentious) tight-knit community and prepares for a summer of new friendships, self-discovery, and her first big romance.

This is a perfect summer read. If I had read this as a teen I would have been obsessed with the idea of going to camp. This book felt like it was squarely aimed at teenagers. The characters thrive in the insular world of camp where older adults and parents play a very small. I hope Sortino dives back into this world one day.

I’m a little annoyed that the cover of the book has a couple on it because this book is about SO MUCH MORE than the romance and I don’t think the cover reflects that. It seems like all publishers want to push is romance. Feels like a disservice.

Pritty by Keith F. Miller Jr.

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Pritty is a queer YA contemporary is an early 2000’s contemporary romance/urban fiction. Jay is a romantic but he’s never felt seen until he literally collides with Leroy.

This book confounded me. It has a lot of good ideas but the plot and pacing didn’t 100% work for me. Jay starts the book getting pulled into a scheme to write love letters for boys in his school,  but that plot disappears and then randomly comes back at the very end. The book then sort of focuses on Jay meeting Leroy and their insta-love/attraction….but it’s mostly about Leory’s family’s ties to an activist organization.

Jay and Leroy meet (what seems like) two times and instantly decide they are in love. Their desire to be together plays a big part in the book…but the relationship doesn’t feel developed. It’s hinted that Leroy knew of Jay growing up—but other parts of the story seem to contradict that. It doesn’t help that they spend most of the book apart. Honestly, Jay and Leroy’s relationships with their friends and family are way more developed than the main romance.


Another odd thing is Jay’s older brother, Jacob, suddenly shows up as a love interest for Leroy’s older brother, Taj.  Except Jacob goes by Jacboee ?  ‘Jacobee’ becomes a fixture in Leroy’s life and yet never mentions that Jay is his brother ? It took me a while to pick up that Jacob and Jacboee were even supposed to be the same character. 

That said,

This book does leave a lot of room for compassion, vulnerability and empathy between Black male characters that I would love to see more of. The young men are allowed to cry, hold each other, and love openly.

This book is based on a manuscript and has a forthcoming animation. The Pritty animation doesn’t seem to include Leory and instead focuses on Jay and a side character. I’m curious how much of  Leroy’s story was in the original manuscript.

Side Note

This book does not explicitly state it takes place in the mid-00s. I was ready to light this book up because they kept mentioning Aliyah, Outkast, boom boxes, and insinuated that teenagers could read cursive. Then a character pulls out a Motoraloa Razar and I settled down.

I’m sure this would have stood out more as a ‘period piece’ to younger readers but it felt so normal to me. TAKE ME BACK 👵🏾

YA Romance : Gap Year

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These YA romances explore the possibilities that happen between high school and what comes next.

I Loved You In Another Life by David Arnold.

Aimless teenagers Shosh and Evan are inexplicably brought together by a song only they can hear. As Shosh and Evan’s story unfolds, we get vignettes of other soulmates meeting across time due to a similar mysterious force. Evan is an introspective anxious artist who has had to become the ‘man’ of his house. Evan is a little in awe that he and  Shosh, his high school’s former theatre queen, are involved in this mystery together

I feel like this could have easily become a manic pixie dream girl situation, but Shosh is given a full personality and comes across as the better developed character. Shosh gave up her acting dreams and began abusing alcohol after the sudden death of her sister.

I do feel like this book needed to bake a little more. I don’t think I really ‘got’ the connection between the other soulmates and Shosh and Evan. Arnold created two interesting characters but I’m not sure if this was the story for them.  I sort of feel like Arnold wanted this to be Evan’s story because Evan’s POV is presented in the first person and Shosh’s is in the third-person. Evan’s POV goes really hard with the purple prose which was a times too navel-gazey for me.

Tilly in Technicolor by Mazey Eddings

Tilly In Technicolor is a breezy, neurodivergent YA romance that is all vibes. Tilly is tired of everyone trying to manage her ADHD and hopes to gain some independence while spending the summer on a European cross-continental business trip with her sister’s beauty start-up.

Joining the trip is Oliver, a successful Instagrammer and brilliant color theorist with autism. There is an instant physical attraction between Tilly and Oliver but the pair quickly find themselves at odds until they open up and discover how each other’s brains work.

My critical takeaway is that the characters don’t really work for their HEA. There are no stakes. There is no growth.

Tilly has the most amount of change in this story but it wasn’t enough for the story to feel developed. She starts the book with no job prospects and a desire to write. She ends with book with a writing job… but it sort of falls into her lap. Honestly, I’m not sure why Oliver even has a POV. Except for meeting Tilly, nothing about his life, personality, or goals has changed by the end of the book. He starts and ends the book in the exact same place. I would have liked a little more coming-of-age.

Jess’ Mini Review Round-Up

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This Time It’s Real by Ann Liang

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This Time It’s Real is a fun contemporary YA following Eliza Lin who writes an essay about her fake boyfriend—only for it to go viral. So she finds the perfect boy, C-Drama star Caz Song, to play the part.

I. Only. Want. To. Read. The. Fake. Dating. Trope. In. YA. I think it works best from this perspective because high school exists in its own little world where things like who you are dating can feel big and life-changing.

I love books that take place outside of the United States and it was fun exploring and learning more about Bejjing through Kaz and Eliza. I also liked that this book featured positive and supportive parents

Last year I read No Filters and Other Lies by Crystal Maldonado which also featured a teen girl lying to the internet. It’s interesting seeing how each author depicts teenagers and their relationship to our social media-saturated world. This book is much lighter with the repercussions, which is odd because the stakes are so much higher in this book; Eliza gets writing and job opportunities based on this no-so-truthful essay and Caz is lying to his very diehard fans.

Overall, this is an easy recommendation if you want a YA romance that is also about finding your place and building better relationships.