Books where you miss the characters when it's over can be rough. I was sad to say goodbye to Jade and her friends. Jade's best friend, Lee Lee goes to public school, while Jade takes a bus across Portland to attend a private school on scholarship. A theme of her story is what girls like her--Black girls from the hood--give to programs like the one that provides Jade's scholarship and later Woman to Woman, which connects her with a mentor from a rich Black family--rather than just what they are gifted.

After two years at St. Francis, Jade still hasn't made any real friends, not even with the few other Black kids, until she notices a girl taking the same bus to school as she does. Sam is white and lives with her grandparents in a less tony part of PDX than the school is, but still far fancier than where Jade, Jade's mom, and sometimes her uncle are.

I ride the 35 through the maze of houses that all look like one another, like sisters who are not twins but everyone thinks they are.

I don't know why this description got me or what it has to do with the story, but it struck me. Maybe because I was that sister.

The whole time Lee Lee is talking, I am thinking about York and Sacagawea, wondering how they must have felt having a form of freedom but no power.

There's a storyline about an enslaved man, York and Sacagawea, who accompanied Lewis and Clark on their explorations and were treated as equals along the way. But when they got home and York ask for his freedom, Clark was like nah.

Jade has had enough of meaningless largesse that does more for the givers than the lucky recipients. She both learns and teaches that she and people in her community have a lot to give.

Rabbit/Ms. Pat is okay now, but it took a lot to get her to where she is now: living in Indiana with her husband-who-has-a-legal job and their kids and working as a stand up comic. She grew up in Atlanta with a troubled mother and her four siblings. Her mom died young, and her sibs were victims of prison and crack. Williams, who had two kids by a 22-year-old by the time she was 15, somehow had a resilience and spark that kept her going. Her unusually visible ghostwriter cites Williams' perfect recall of the details of her life. I wish it were easier to tell, given how ghost? partner? writer Jeannine Amber makes it clear who did the actual writing, how much is support/amplification of Williams's voice and what is intervention. I assume stuff like

I knew from experience that next to jail the place with the highest concentration of trifling bitches was elementary school.

has to come straight from the comic or her comedy routine.

Listen to her on Marc Maron's podcast if you can tolerate white guy comedians interrupting Black women better than I can.

Catfishing has two narrators, a teen named Steph and...an AI (Artificial Intelligence). The book starts with AI saying

My two favorite things to do with my time are helping people and looking at cat pictures

, which is RELATABLE CONTENT to a lot of librarians, including myself. I flew through this YA novel about the dangers of data hacking and queer teens saving the world, despite the fact that the AI does more helping people than looking at cat pictures. The online community connection--most of Steph's friends are in her "Clowder" on "CatNet"--will be appealing to gamers, and non-cat aficionados will be happy to know that other animals get screen/page time, too.

I was absolutely taken with this book's start, "We live in the dregs of Queens, New York, where airplanes fly so low that we are certain they will crush us. On our block, a lonely tree grows. Its branches tangle in power lines. Its roots upend sidewalks where we ride our bikes before they are stolen. Roots that render the concrete slabs uneven, like a row of crooked teeth. ... In front yards grow tomatoes that have fought their way through the hard earth."

There's more poetry as Andreades's story of third culture brown girls coming of age unfolds. Sadly, the first person plural narrative put me off, and I didn't finish the book. I hope others, with more of a love for experimental storytelling will get out of the novel what I didn't.

Following [b:Catfishing on CatNet|41556068|Catfishing on CatNet (CatNet, #1)|Naomi Kritzer|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1568119890l/41556068._SY75_.jpg|64836558], Chaos starts with Steph and her mom relocated to Minneapolis and Steph going to a school that she hopes to graduate from. At the school, she meets Nell, a girl who was separated from her rural religious community after her mother went missing without a trace. Nell, who co-narrates, finds herself living with her father and her father's female partner--and each of their female partners, who Nell calls Things 1, 2, and 3. It turns out that Nell has a secret that makes her more relatable to Steph than she might have thought at first. After a lifetime on the run, Steph is sympathetic to a newbie at school. Plus she's got her own personal AI, Cat, should anything funky transpire.

As you might imagine, funky things transpire. Steph, her mom, her friends, and Cat find themselves needing to stop hordes of Christians and pranksters being manipulated by...another AI and its dangerously misguided human, as they try to reboot humankind.

Placing her novel in a near-futures Minneapolis (with a Floyd Plaza), Kritzer uses Chaos to explore what law enforcement might look like in a mostly post-police city. The way she imagines it made me nervous at first.

"Minneapolis has a really unusual police department," Hermione says, "Like it's got very few actual police."

Steph responds

"Anyway, last night, the police I ran into were all very nice to me. They kept giving me vouchers to buy myself a warmer coat. And some of them didn't even have guns.

I thought maybe Kritzer was mocking a force comprised of social workers, but twenty pages later, Hermione brings the issue up again.

"Which means that in a situation they're not in control of, [police] tend to overreact, and they prioritize control over public safety, which generally makes rioting worse. Minneapolis's public safety department treats riots more like a wildfire--barriers that make it harder to spread, for example."

Okay. That is a good assessment of what's wrong with policing. Kritzer herself writes in the book's author's note

I tried to provide a plausible vision of public safety workers whose first priority is public safety

I like it, though I'm not sure she makes her case. Still, in teens save the world novels, there's really no room for anyone but the teens to save the world.

prose before bros

Protagonist Eva Mercy is a writer, as is her friend Belinda, and their other friend Cece is a publisher, so "prose before bros" is real. The 15th installment of Eva's erotic fantasy Cursed series about vampires and witches is due, but she can't get herself to write it. She's consumed instead, and as always, with her seventh-grade daughter Audre and her devastating migraines. Seven Days is a book with a disabled main character, with her pain in an almost "supporting" role. (I say that not to make light of migraines. I'm a sufferer, too, though not nearly to the extent as Eva or her creator, Tia Williams. I'm trying to figure out how to say this is a book with a disabled character without being a book about disability, but I'm concerned I'm not getting it right and being insensitive.)

Eva is mostly raising her talented tween and getting by, when she is rocked by a demon (vampire?) from her past. Eva's love story goes as you might expect, getting help from precocious tweenage Audre, who I'd like to see a novel from Williams about. The love story encompasses a lot more though--race, sex, generational pain, childhood trauma, all of which give it more depth. I'm not doing the novel justice. Like my sister Danna, who recommended Seven Days to me, I loved it, but unlike Danna am failing at capturing what makes the book so great. Find out for yourself!

Apparently I love male gay YA. Who knew? Especially when I barely ever read books by or even about men! Still, Passing, even with (because of?) its perfect protagonists, Spencer and Justice, is a lovable read. We meet Spencer on his first day of school. He hasn't moved, he's just started at a new private school, where he can be the boy he is meant to be. Justice wouldn't be at Oakley either, if he didn't have a soccer scholarship. His dad is a parson in a fundamentalist church, and Justice's siblings (Noble, Piety, Steadfast, and one other) are homeschooled. So, while the characters aren't particularly flawed, there are obstacles on their path to the prom.

The boys begin as enemies at soccer tryouts, when Justice is a jerk to Spencer, and Spencer tries to resist how smitten he is with Justice. Spencer, though shorter than anyone on the team, has some special talents, including finding holes/devising strategies. The coach and the rest of the team accept Spencer, so eventually Justice does, too. Despite being smitten, Spencer doesn't take shit from Justice, responding,

Full offense, that sounds pretty homophobic

when Justice refers to his family's "traditional" values. Lol--do kids still say "no offense" when they're saying something offensive?

Spencer is a sophomore, and read young to me, but I wonder if most YA novels are writing 15 as older than they really are?