Tagged with sisters

Riches to rags story of a 14-year-old on the cusp of graduating from middle school. If you have a hard time sympathizing with poor little rich girls, this might not be the book for you. It’s not the worst read, though, and the ending is a little surprising.

Tween Black Panther lit! Three kids travel to Oakland for the summer to stay with their estranged and unmotherly mother. She sends them out every day to Black Panther breakfast and summer camp while she stays home and writes poems for the revolution. The story is told from the oldest girl's point-of-view. At 11, and motherless for most of her life, she takes care of her younger sisters and is fearful about hanging out with the Panthers. Still, she takes in their message, and it makes her stronger. Not that she wasn't plenty strong already. Delphine is a nuanced and believable character, as are her sisters. I loved the tidbits defining African-American kids lives in the 60s/70s, them counting black people on television and how many lines they had, encountering white hippies in the Haight and Teutonic tourists in Chinatown, and most of all their getting to see the BPP as an aid organization.

Last year I read and enjoyed Nguyen's childhood memoir Stealing Buddha's Dinner, so I was way psyched to learn that she had a novel out. In some ways, this story of two sisters takes place where the memoir left off, although with a different cast of characters. The women, born in the US to Vietnamese immigrant parents about a year apart, are in their late twenties and facing what some call the Saturn Return. The older one, Van, is having marriage woes, and the younger Linny has boyfriend problems and also a (related) job crisis to deal with. Plus with their mother is long dead, and their father is only semi-capable of taking care of himself, good Asian girls are expected to pick up the slack.

What if Red Riding Hood's wolf was actually a werewolf and Red Riding Hood vowed revenge against the bad doggie who ate her grandma? That's more or less the story Ms. Pearce tells, except that Red Riding Hood is actually sisters, one a fighter and one a lover.