Tagged with YA

I'm having a hard time writing this review because I love the book so much. I've read it a bunch of times (five? ten?) since I first encountered it as a child. It's about a 14-year-old African-American girl coming up in a poor neighborhood of an unnamed northern city. She wants to feel like part of something, and gets her chance when she wrangles a former storefront church with an old piano in it into a clubhouse for her and the kids who previously had to hang out on the street, dodging a vindictive cop named Lafferty.

Student council president Holland Jaeger was finds herself less interested in boyfriend Seth than in transfer student Cece. Cece is totally open about her sexuality, but makes some mistakes as she helps Holland understand hers. Of the three queer YA novels I've read lately, this was the most affective (i.e tear-jerking). Strangely though I didn't love the writing, I found the book deeply compelling (except the day I accidentally left it at work and had nothing to read on the subway home). In addition to being a coming out story, it's also about parent/child relationships, learning to be open-minded about people from wacky subcultures (e.g. goths), and finding oneself as an artist. I'd say more, but there are too many spoilers to worry about.

This time the lesbian teen is a different type of orthodox: Cuban-American from Miami. Laura gets busted with a love note from her girlfriend the last day of junior year and gets kicked out of her house for being a degenerada. Luckily she's got a best friend with and understanding mima who take her in. The book is Laura's journey out of the closet. I found it a little too much, like the author was trying to hard to pack everything in, and the cover reminds me of what they did to Leilaina's film in Reality Bites, turning it from a thoughtful documentary about lost youth into an MTV high concept/low content pre-reality show reality show. That's just the cover and crazy fontage I'm vilifying. The story is fine, but one of those YA novels that is better left to its intended audience instead of middle-aged ladies like me. It has plenty going for it: transgender and genderqueer characters, Cuban Spanish idioms, sexy round chicks, and standing up to homophobic bullies.

This book got me to wondering about the Ls, who moved in down the street from me when I was a kid. They were from Chile, but I have no idea if they fled oppression or sneaked out with their money. Probably the former, given the timing, but I think my parents didn't like them, so I don't know. Anyway, this book is written mostly from the point of view of the son of a Chilean political prisoner. While the father, Marcelo, was being tortured in jail, his wife, eleven-year-old son Daniel, and eight-year-old daughter Tina emigrated to Madison, Wisconsin. Eventually the family is reunited, but Marcelo is very broken. At seventeen Daniel is doing pretty well; he has a girlfriend, excels at soccer, and plays guitar in a band. His sister isn't thriving quite as handily, and I'm not sure about Mamá.