Beautiful Country is what the US is called in Mandarin--at least by people who haven't emigrated here yet. Qian and her mother join Qian's dad in America in 1994, when Qian is 7. Her dad was critical of the Chinese government and wanted to be free. Unfortunately freedom didn't pay well, and the family was crushingly poor. Qian's mom, a math and computer professor in China, gets her first job in a sweatshop, bringing Qian along. Even as Qian gains fluency in English, life and school are hard. Her teacher doesn't believe she's writing her own essays, and she's told to change her clothes more often. Qian would wear the same pair of shoe for a year--starting with them being too large, and ending the year with her toes sticking out. She faced more than one kind of hunger growing up.

This isn't a tell-all memoir, and there is little blame placed on her parents. Wang is empathetic, even when she's disappointed. (content warning about incidents with a cat). I'm not doing it justice, so I'll just say it's a beautiful telling of a hard life that thankfully ends in triumph. I hope her parents are proud!

Remembrance is told in voices: Abigail, Gaelle, Margot, and Winter, who are in a disconnected line of Haitian women in America. Abigail was born in Africa, but was captured and brought to Haiti. Margot and Winter were born into bondage, and Gaelle is "free." I say "free" because Gaelle is facing eviction and lonely, her condition caused or exacerbated by inherited trauma and lack of wealth.

The books starts off fast but becomes a slog, unfortunately. Still, give it a try if you like magic realism and complicated endings.

Damn it. I wrote a good review for this book, and it got swallowed up.

When we meet 16-year-old Piper, she's a functioning oral: a d/Deaf person who lip reads and speaks. She's an enthusiastic consumer of Recon, a food substitute produced by her mother's company. The McBrides live in a dystopic Melbourne, Australia where a greedy corporation controls the government and thereby the population by distributing this fake food that becomes less available as they story progresses. Recon has ended cancer and other ills. "Wild" food is viewed with suspicion.

Piper doesn't think much of her disability or the food situation until she meets Marley, a bike shop guy and later his d/Deaf mom, Robbie, who grows vegetables and animals to sustain them. As Piper begins to learn sign language, the massive headaches caused by her hearing aids wane. Her interest in growing food waxes at the same time, aided by the constant hunger gnawing at her now that her Recon rations have been cut in half.

Marley, being a bike shop guy, is obviously a hottie, but he's not totally the perfect YA boyfriend. He has his asshole moments, especially while he's wrestling with his identity as a CODA (Child of a Deaf Adult) and what that means when being in a relationship with a Deaf girl. The most perfect person in the book is Robbie, who is compassionate and strong and helps Piper to understand that she doesn't have to conform to hearing culture, even though Piper's mom is set on Piper's being as "normal" as possible.

Meanwhile government and mercenary oppressions seek to destroy public gardens and protest. Piper is an artist; the book is told in the form of her diary/sketchbook. When others see some of her drawings, they encourage her to use them as stencils and protest signs. That goes as well as you might expect and leads to a reckoning.

A favorite quote from the book is graffiti on the bike shop wall.

Imagine: If the GDP was replaced with a contentment index.

Highly recommended, especially for permaculture nerds, d/Deaf people, and people who want to overthrow corporate governments.

Caveat--I read it as an ebook, which I advise against. Because the text is on decorated diary pages, you can't adjust the size, and it's impossible to read on a phone. It's okay on a tablet, but still not great. Maybe the published version will be easier to navigate?

Thanks, NetGalley for the free ARC.

Have you seen the stirring documentary Live Live Nude Girls Unite? Neon Girls is a memoir of one stripper/unionist's experience working at the Lusty Lady. Worley is a queer grad student eking out a thin salary at a publishing house in the East Bay when she sees an ad for strippers at double her current hourly wage. 1990s San Francisco Bay Area feminism embraced women taking control of their sexuality.

It's when the strippers realized they didn't have total control that they began really questioning their labor conditions. Some of the viewing booths have one-way windows--to provide the customers with anonymity--which obviously they take advantage of by filming the dancers without their consent, robbing them of their privacy and ability to make a living.

There are other or more significant issues, depending on your positionality. The Lusty had rules about how many "exotics" could be onstage at any given time, and how many performers could have small breasts, which meant lots of shifts for curvy white women, and the ability to take extra shifts, and the shaft for women of color. Same went for private rooms. A white dancer needed just to ask for a shift in the more lucrative booth, where a Black dancer was given a "wait and see" to their request.

As an academic, Worley provides history, placing the Lusties on a continuum from 1970s sex workers in France and San Francisco and to the more recent EDA: Exotic Dancers Alliance. The EDA had formed due to even worse conditions at other San Francisco clubs, where dancers had to pay stage fees and hustle lap dances while offstage. She also relates a new-to-me term that only gets about 1500 hit on the Goog, snarxist, which she uses to describe the union's "minister of propaganda."

The union has triumphs and tragedies--some of the most reliable tear bait for fans of fighting The Man. There's one story about the queer/burlesque community showing its support that is positively gleeful. Same with other union members supporting the picket. That is some feel-good solidarity, at which San Francisco excels.

One caveat: I would like to read a BIPOC dancer's narrative to center and better understand their struggles, as they are referenced, but not fully articulated in Worley's story.

Best friends and rising seniors Eleanor (Leni) and Chanel (Nelly) are very serious about their high school cheer team. We meet Leni first, as she's working her way through grueling physical therapy after spending junior year on the disabled list due to a concussion she sustained in practice. Nelly, on the other hand, is at a cheer camp, with the 24 next most promising prospects. In addition to being a star athlete, Nelly has strong grades and stronger determination to build the future she wants.

Their senior year doesn't start off as expected. Leni connects with a football player (the football player at their Georgia school) she meets at PT and gets an unexpected prize. Things are rocky between the two, but they are brought together by a spontaneous show of support for a Colin Kaepernick stand in, an alum of their school. The cheer team kneels during the national anthem. The school and town respond as one might expect, and as expected, the consequences differ for white Leni and Black Nelly.

Despite all the "as expecteds," it seemed to me the story was going in a strange direction, so if you find yourself thinking Leni is the more sympathetic character and wondering why, it takes a minute to realize the ways she is immature and flawed due to her lack of racial justice awareness. A favorite moment is when the Wise Negro character sends Leni away to learn from her own people, in this case Leni's rabbi.

Nelly's character development is more nuanced, with her growth happening within and with more work and less approval.

Thanks, Edelweiss, for the free ARC.

Anna is recovering from two deaths: her father's and her own. That is, she and her mother have moved to Scotland after revenge port ruined Anna's life in Birmingham, England. Her starting over starts off well when she is befriended by Cat and Lish, but of course Anna's previous life comes back to haunt her, including revealing a devastating secret of one of her new besties.

There's a subplot where Anna researchers a 17th (I think) century witch, Maggie, who Anna believes may have once lived in her house. The witch storyline is presumably meant to echo or deepen the viral, torturous deep fakes of Anna doing porn stuff, but I didn't connect as well to that part.

Reflecting on the book now, I realize I found it highly compelling, but kind of...didn't love it.

Whew! When They Call You a Terrorist, while a smooth read, is hard on the psyche, in a way that presumably underscores what it's like to be Black in America. Police and incarceration, injustice and indifference are part of Patrisse's life from childhood, leaving bodies in their wake and irreparable scars on the survivors, including herself. Still, like her mother, Patrisses is ceaselessly driven to improve life for her family, her community, and eventually the world when she, along with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi start the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

As with the myth of Rosa Parks as a tired woman who didn't feel like getting up one day, Khan-Cullors, Garza, and Tometi may have happened on a hashtag, but when they did, they were ready. Some of Khan-Cullors most cutting takes

And Columbine hasn't happened yet so we don't yet have the bars and the metal detectors. Because that's what happened in the wake of the horrific school shooting in a town that was mostly white in a school that was mostly white. Black and Brown kids across the country got police in their schools, complete with drug-sniffing dogs, bars on the windows and metal detectors.

and

Who has ever been accountable to Black people

and how about this one, patriots?

License plates are being made in prisons along with 50 percent of all American flags

Note to self about buying American made goods to avoid supporting sweatshops in other countries. Is there a way of knowing which items/companies use prison labor?

In the state of California, a human being is killed by a police officer roughly every 72 hours.
Sixty-three percent of these people killed by police are Black or Latinx.

And finally, here's an idea

All the money put in to suppress a community. We'd need far less to ensure it thrived.

Some sweet things, too, like how Khan-Cullors would share journals with her friends and lovers. She is a late millennial, loving the intimacy of print!

This epistolary novel has queer teens, pen pals, punk and big fuck-you-Anita-Bryant energy ("ANITA! YOU LIAR! WE'LL SET YOUR HAIR ON FIRE" goes a protest chant), which means a lot to love. It's 1977, and the protagonists connect when their Orange County Christian and San Francisco Catholic school students randomly assign them as pen pals. I'm not sure about the likelihood of that intramural/intrasectional collaboration, but I'm not going to quibble with such an enjoyable and impactful teen novel.

Not enough fuck-you-Anita-Bryant content? Here's another one:

"I spilled my orange juice and it got all over me and I had to change my skirt. I iddn't have time to clean up, but it got all over my notebook, too, and--
"OH, MY FUCKING GOD. ORANGE JUICE. I KNEW THIS WAS ALL ANITA FUCKING BRYANT'S FAULT."

The scene is the struggle against Prop 6, which would ban queer teachers (and their allies) from public schools. A San Francisco marcher held a sign that read,

WOULD YOU WANT MICHELANGELO TEACHING YOUR CHILDREN ART?"

bless

An offstage character in the novel is Harvey Milk. The Orange County character, Tammy, writes him letters when she's not writing to Sharon (her SF pen pal). She gets to have Harvey when she needs him, but for the Twinkie-aware reader, the knowledge of his fate casts an important memory shadow over San Francisco's joy.

The subtitle: "A Story of War and What Comes After" explains the memoir's structure. Each chapter has the year above it in a clever and effective timeline device, letting the reader know whether it's then or now. "Then" is the period where Clemantine and her older sister Claire are on the run from war, poverty, starvation, and violence beginning in Rwanda where Clemantine spent her first six years. The next seven see her walk hundreds, if not thousands of miles, from refugee camps and other temporary housing.

Between those chapters, where you think Clemantine might get some relief, bring Clemantine from the tween who landed in Chicago wearing her first winter coat, to a notable young adulthood that brought Clemantine to connect with Elie Wiesel, Oprah Winfrey, and Barack Obama. Clemantine's struggles as a survivor are nearly as fraught as her war years.

I don't know how to contextualize this, but I want to post it somewhere, so I can come back to it because it's so tender.

There's a lovely word in Swahili: nishauri. It means "advise me." When someone was mad at you, they would come to your house and sti down and talk and say, This is very disrespectful and I think we should consult each other on how to move forward. Let's make peace here and come to a conclusion that is beautiful.

40 pages later

It's not enough for outsiders to want to atone for their sins. They need to look at themselves, their history and biases, and make a plan for how not to repeat their crimes.

I don't know what else I meant to say when I paused writing this review last week. I do know that I wanted to comment on Wamariya's self-awareness and empathy for herself and those around her.