May is Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month, Jewish American Heritage Month, and Mental Health Awareness month. Here are some great teen novels celebrating and exploring these identities and experiences.
In The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen by Isaac Blum, Hoodie’s somewhat limited life in the Orthodox Jewish quarter isn’t so bad until he meets and falls in love with Anna-Marie Diaz-O’Leary, the daughter of the mayor who is trying to keep Hoodie’s community out of town.
Jennieke Cohen’s My Fine Fellow follows three teens in their pursuit of culinary greatness in 1830s London. Helena knows she can be a star if she can produce something no one has tasted before, and her best friend Penelope hopes to introduce Filipino flavors to stodgy old England. When they meet Elijah, who must hawk his delicious pasties on the streets because merchants won’t allow a Jew to own a business, they know that together, the three of them can transform London’s cuisine.
Lauren Melissa Ellzey’s book The Boy at the Window tells how Daniel’s attempt to fly lands him in a mental hospital, where he struggles to hold onto reality. Once he is released, he joins a cross-country running team and meets Jiwon-Yoon, who will either join him in his fantasy or help free him from it once and for all.
In The Poetry of Secrets by Cambria Gordon, Isabel’s family pretends to be Christian to avoid the watchful Inquisition, and even arranges her marriage to the town warden for their protection. But her heart must be free, and her meeting with Diego, who burns to paint as much as she wishes to write poetry, sets them on a dangerous path.
In The Silence That Binds Us by Joanna Ho, May and her parents grieve her older brother’s death by suicide, and she finds herself fighting stereotypes about successful Asian families.
In Limbo by Deborah Lee shows how Jung-Jin has struggled to fit in in America since moving from South Korea, and how her dedication to art saves her life.
Malinda Lo’s A Scatter of Light, a stand-alone follow-up to The Last Night at the Telegraph Club, tells Aria’s story. After an embarrassing photo of her is leaked online, her parents send her to San Francisco to spend the summer with her grandmother. There she meets gender non-conforming Steph, who shows her how to be her true self.
In This Rebel Heart by Katherine Locke, Csilla spends her days as a lowly typist in the Hungarian Communist regime that executed her parents for being Jewish. When the government exonerates them and reburies them, Csilla senses change in the air, and decides to flee.
The Summer of Lost Letters by Hannah Reynolds follows Abigail Schoenberg, whose discovery of her late grandmother’s love letters leads her to Nantucket for the summer, where she meets Noah, the grandson of the man who wrote those letters. Noah’s reluctance to let her ask his grandfather about the letters hints at deep family secrets.
In Eight Nights of Flirting, also by Hannah Reynolds, Shira must spend Hanukkah with her former crush and current enemy Tyler, who makes a deal with her to teach her how to flirt if she will get him free career counseling with her rich uncle.
Love and Other Natural Disasters by Mia Sugiura follows Nozomi, who received a pity kiss from her crush, and now decides to leap at the chance to be Willow’s fake girlfriend, and hopefully something more. But what if Willow is not as good a catch as she seems?
In Nancy Werlin’s Zoe Rosenthal is Not Lawful Good, Zoe’s perfectly planned life takes a sharp turn away from her perfect boyfriend when she becomes obsessed with a soon-to-be-canceled TV show and starts going to as many cons as she can to save it.
~ posted by Wally B.
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