Marí's dad has been a politician for maybe half of her 15 years, and now the Republican senator from (or congressmember? I forget) is running for president. Marí has taken her dad's political life and goodness for granted all these years, and her seven-year-old brother Ricky (yep, Cubans with a kid named Ricky--they love I Love Lucy) is gaga for their father and loves publicly supporting him. Marí, on the other hand, is about done with invasions of her privacy, having her social media curated, and having everyone at school know her business.

All that was bad enough...until she started to really see her father's politics and their consequences.

Sounds good, right? But the rendering was merely good, or maybe reading the book under quarantine my head wasn't in the best space for it.

Moving to a hick southern town from DC for your senior year of high school to spend time with your crotchety dying grandmother when you're Black and queer--living the dream, right? Not so much. Still, Avery is interested in getting to know Mama Letty, despite the latter's resistance. She's kind of over her best friends in DC, including the one she used to date. She's lucky enough to find new besties: her scrumptious next door neighbor Simone, and Simone's perfect white homie Jade.

Secrets come out, fences get broken, tears are shed, and love gets mended. And sometimes justice isn't served and old wounds go unhealed.

"'Maybe they're not petty little things.'
"'It's been years since my mom left, Jade, years!'
"'Exactly. It's been years and whatever broke them is still bothering them. That means it must've been serious.'
"'Serious enough that Mama Letty is literally about to die and my mom still can't let it go?'
Jade shrugged. 'Trauma is a bitch who keeps on giving. It's hard to let go of something you haven't worked through. Some would argue it's impossible.'"

***

Perhaps you've observed, like I have, that Tarot is gaining on astrology in certain circles.

"She tented her fingers. 'I knew this would happen. My card tried to warn me.'
'Your card?'
'The Three of Swords,' she said, exasperated I wasn't keeping up. 'It represents heartbreak and hardship.'"

***

And here's some Zoomer realness:

"I learned active shooter drills the same time I learned my ABCs, every summer was the hottest on record. The pandemic paused a majority of my high school years, and I'd been convinced the only way to make it up was to go, go, go full steam ahead. And now this. It was Mama Letty's last days and there wasn't nearly enough time to make up everything I'd lost. Life was short. Everything was urgent and who had time to breathe in all that?"

[b:Pride and Prejudice|1885|Pride and Prejudice|Jane Austen|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320399351l/1885._SY75_.jpg|3060926] fans will love this retelling where the hater-lovers are a pair of Desi forensics competitors. Deep nerdery abounds as the two use debate tactics to make their points. I don't generally happen to enjoy 19th century will-they-or-won't-they, but the protagonists are interesting enough here that I was willing to put up with the necessary alignment with the source text.

Favorite line

"All right, all right, Che Guevara, don't get your beret in a twist," replied Jay with a grin.

btw Jay is a gender-reversed, gay Jane Bennet. Many of the book's characters are BIPOC, with notable exceptions like the Bingleys.

I hadn't read this book since probably around the time it came out. I remember thinking it was good, but not great, which is still my feeling. There is some solid literary craftsmanship, but I don't know how to feel about the mixed sympathies. I get that the wives in Gilead are oppressed, but it seems strange for a handmaid to see beyond the complicity of her monthly rape. I think it's a good metaphor for a kind of All (Cis) Women Matter "feminism" TERFiness.

If you don't know here name, Welteroth is the person who made Teen Vogue into a critical and inclusive platform. She's a biracial Black woman who grew up lower middle class in California. She's open about the dumb things she did (mostly with men, but also with asserting herself) on the way to the top of a Condé Nast masthead at the age of 29. As a writer and journalist, her prose is as good as you'd expect--and well-sourced with depressing stats like

a girl's confidence peaks at just nine years old.

(come to think of it, that around when mine crashed!)

Oof--and this vicious tidbit of realness

If you ever wonder how a teenage girl feels about herself, where she is in life, who she's trying to be, just look at what is going on with her hair.

I love a fashion person who is also a psychology person and a political person.

This statement rocked me, too, because I think of all the shit girls and women put up with in the name of fighting for relationships

Growing up, girls are warned about the kind of abuse that leaves bruises and scars behind. But the cyclical mistreatment I was experiencing was invisible--it wasn't what people wrote magazine articles about or went on morning shows to discuss. And so I kept covering up how awful I was feeling inside, assuming this was what people meant when they said relationships were hard.

She wrote this in the section about a man she dated in her twenties, but it could also apply to the boy man she was with for five years of high school and college--the person she talked herself into believing Sacramento State was the place for her over Stanford because that's where he went. Sac worked out well because Welteroth met her first important mentor there, but it's wild to me that even such a superstar can be swayed like that over a lover.

She, necessarily, speaks of her FOD (first only different, per Shonda Rhimes) experience and just how fraught it is being alone, no matter how well you might be doing in terms of tangible success.

When you occupy space in systems that weren't built for you, your authenticity is your activism.

One's expectations can be so low that an expression of solidarity can be shocking, as when Welteroth's friend and colleague is outraged that a coworker cuts herself off in the middle of observing that Welteroth was "working like a sla..."

His angry reaction surprised me. It honestly hadn't occurred to me that I could share this with a White person and be met with this kind of empathy. I had encountered and swallowed so many uncomfortable moments like those, but seeing his rage, I realized I hadn't ever processed my own.

Later she writes

But we rarely discuss the marks and scars and bruises that come with breaking through glass ceilings.

My one quibble with Welteroth is when she refers to "the platform I was given." Um, GIVEN? I don't think so. Earned, at the very least.

Disclaimer: I'm friendly with the author. Like, I can't remember if we've met in person, but we've traded zines and are connected via social media.

Recommendation: if you're not a big poetry reader, keep a book of poems in your bathroom. For me, at least, poems are more powerful when they're read in ones and twos. Do some people read a book of poems the same way they do a novel?

Anyway: Jessy's poems are about everyday life as a person who loves--her kids, her spouse, and even humanity, as is evidenced by the title poem. In it, the narrator DJ's a suicide hotline's hold music, bring the callers out of themselves with borderline obnoxiousness and record skips.

The poems are funny; some of them are diagram poems, like

and a poignant bar chart of "Number of people you slept with in my bed in New York City (including me)."

A poem called Taxes bruised my middle-aged heart

You showed me how
at the top of our taxes
there’s a bold black box for
DECEASED.

They don’t want you to miss it.
They don’t want you to accidentally claim
your spouse is still around.

How we laughed.

But someday one of us
(only one)
will check that box.

This NYC working girls (like secretaries, that is) novel was a big deal when it premiered in 1958, according to the description. Caroline graduated from Radcliffe at 20 and is reeling from a broken engagement, Gregg wants to be an actress, I forget if April, an eager-to-please hick from Colorado, also wants to act; Barbara is a divorced assistant editor with a toddler. Each is looking for love and success. Typically the best route to love is an older man, but some attractive younger men are decoys.

For today's reader, the young women's lives aren't big news. You can predict that there will be a pregnancy, a death, and a marriage and a promotion. The book is long, but doesn't drag, and the ending is abrupt.

Daughter of Chinese immigrants Everett (Ever) Wong is expected to be a doctor, and has even gotten into a pre-med/med program at Northwestern, but what she really wants to do is dance. Her parents screw that up by making yet another sacrifice to send her to a summer program in Tapei, known colloquially as a "love boat." Chinese hyphenate parents send their diasporic kids there to learn about their culture and maybe fall in love with the Right person. One of the first people Ever meets is Rick Woo, the Rightest person there is. She's known about his successes from an immigrant press--he's a spelling bee champ, piano whiz, and now Yale-bound football player. Her nickname for him is Boy Wonder. She also meets a straight up player named Xavier, who is from a wealthy family. Her first love boat friend is Rick's cousin, Sophie, who is also struggling with family expectations.

The story is full of tropes like fake dating, betrayal, and putting on a show. It's a fun enough read, and I appreciate how Ever struggles with repaying her family's sacrifices. She notes, echoing the Chinese last name first formation, "I'm a Wong before I'm Ever." Eventually she determines that her happiness might be as much a reward for her parents as her becoming surgeon general.

The story centers on two actors in a popular fantasy show, Galaxy Spark. The first person narrator, Lily, who has been out as queer for a while now, is in a gender identity crisis, which isn't helped by her mother's plan to have Lily's next gig be a heteronormative modern Cinderella story. Lily convinces Galaxy Spark's producers to create a queer romance for Lily's character Morgantha and co-star Greta's character Alieta, and of course that's followed by a fake offscreen romance. Meanwhile, Lily is living a true life as Frey in an online questing game, where they first identify themself as trans with some help from a new member of the band, Aida.

When I went to check out what others said about the book on Goodreads, I noted a lot of rancor. Readers accuse author Ellor of being misogynistic and lesbophobic. I looked around for an inciting incident but didn't find it, so I'm unclear if Ellor, a trans man, did something egregious, or if the commenters are TERFy. Therefore I read the book with as much awareness and care as I can summon as a ciswoman. I did find that Lily paints womanhood with a femme brush and denies that femmes can be queer.

"...you can't see a trace of queer on me. I'm stuffed in a tight green dress, frilled and fitted with a wide bust. My shoulder-length hair is curled and stacked high on my head. Heavy makeup covers my zits, and my blush and eyeliner are bright and camera-ready."

I think there are hella queer femmes who would live their best lives in a premier gown.

Also, "Thank god I didn't pick up on the conditioning that gives so many girls in Hollywood a problem with food. Maybe that should have been my first clue I wasn't a girl at all."

I will note that I appreciate the lowercase "god."

I've got more quotes to back up my thoughts on Frey/Ellor's narrow definition of queer, but there are other aspects of the book I want to amplify, like Greta being asexual and Frey's journey with whiteness and using their/his platform for pushing back against racism, as well as homophobia. The Galaxy Spark creators assemble a diverse cast and then kill off the non-normative characters at the first opportunity for maximum emotional manipulation. It's Frey's half-brother, who is Black and another actor on the show, who kicks off the rebellion, expanding Frey's understanding of who all is othered in the industry, and suddenly everyone is on board, with a female executive saying, "When I came into this business, I was fighting with all I had just to carve out a space for me. But a space for me, a cis white lady isn't good enough."

Ellor gives us a view into coming into yourself as a sexual minority even within sexual minorities with Frey wondering, "Maybe I'm just nebulous and weird. Maybe I made all this dysphoria up for attention." and "It's harder to say 'I'm nonbinary' or 'I'm asexual' without getting into a big debate defending that your identity exists." For me the struggle went a little long, but ymmv. There are important realities conveyed in this queer teen romance. I'm eager to learn what others more vulnerable to misportrayal have to say about the book.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the free DRC.