Category: 5 Things I Love About

“5 Things I Love About…” is a blog series about what makes some of my recent reads stand out. While I do my best to avoid major spoilers, some of the details I list could be considered minor spoilers.

After several heavy reads in a row, I was in the mood for something light and sweet and soft and summery. (Pleasantly summery, I mean. Not the twelve-month-long blast of ultimate humidity we have here in Florida.) The Summer of Jordi Perez (and the Best Burger in Los Angeles) by Amy Spalding beckoned like a cheerful rainbow beacon from my TBR pile, and it was just what I needed.

This story is practically the heart-eyes emoji in book form. Abby Ives takes a summer internship at Lemonberry, her favorite fashion boutique, with the hope of landing a paid position in the fall. Abby is fat and gay (and on both counts, the book contains some wonderfully positive representation), and while she’s super-confident in some ways, she also has some really relatable insecurities (example: she refuses to post photos of herself on her popular fashion/style Tumblr). When she learns she’ll be sharing the internship (and competing for that eventual job) with talented photographer Jordi Perez, Abby has to reevaluate her plans a bit — and things get even more complicated when she and Jordi start dating.

How could I not love this story? 2018 seems to be the Year of the Fashion-Forward Fat Girl (my own Natalie in MAMMOTH is also a fat fashion blogger, and I think she and Abby could hang out and talk shop for HOURS), and I am living for it.

So here we go! Five things I love:

1. The Los Angeles setting. The detail was fantastic and vivid, from the June Gloom to the Grove to evening movies at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. I’ve only been to L.A. once, but now I want to go back and do a Jordi Perez Grand Tour.

2. Abby’s unapologetically pink hair! I stan.

3. The unlikely friendship that develops between Abby and Jax, a bro who’s collecting data for his dad’s new restaurant-rating app by testing every burger place in the city. I kept expecting Jax to be a jerk, but I ended up appreciating his goofy sincerity most of the time.

4. The details behind the food photography featured on Abby’s mom’s blog. Eyeliner “grill marks” on a turkey burger! Fruit sprayed with deodorant! I’ve been fascinated by that kind of thing ever since I learned that the “milk” in cereal commercials is sometimes Elmer’s Glue.

5. Abby’s line after her first kiss with Jordi:

My heart. ❤ I couldn’t have asked for a sweeter summer read.

“5 Things I Love About…” is a blog series about what makes some of my recent reads stand out. While I do my best to avoid major spoilers, some of the details I list could be considered minor spoilers.

[Content warning: You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone contains some suicidal ideation and self-harm.]

Okay. I’m promising myself right now that the next few books I feature in this series will be light and fluffy and frothy. Between last month’s focus on The Hate U Give and today’s installment, I’ve been through the YA wringer.

It’s a glorious wringer, though.

Rachel Lynn Solomon’s debut, You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone, is about Adina and Tovah, twin sisters whose mother has Huntington’s. This means that the girls each have a 50% chance of developing the disease as well; their mother’s decline might mirror their own futures. When they go through genetic testing, one twin tests negative. The other tests positive. This adds another layer of conflict to the girls’ already strained relationship as they navigate the senior year of high school and wrestle with what’s to come.

I described this story as gorgeous and wrenching over on Instagram. You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone is beautiful. It’s heavy. It’s a brave, poetic punch to the gut.

Five things I love:

1. The divide between the twins. The conflict that drove Adina and Tovah apart is revealed gradually, which had my curiosity in overdrive, and it builds on itself through most of the book. Tovah touches on it early on in this quote, but the narrative dances around the details for several more chapters:

2. The split narrative. The story alternates between the twins’ points of view, which adds to the power of that gradual revelation. I enjoyed experiencing everything through both Tovah’s and Adina’s perspectives. Understanding their motives and emotions made the story more complex.

3. Adina’s flaws. I admit that I’m firmly Team Tovah, but Solomon’s depiction of Adina is brave and unflinching. Even when I didn’t like Adina much, I still found myself rooting for her. I wanted her to figure things out and find some balance, some happiness. (And as someone with tons of nervous habits, I related so much to her habit of picking at her tights.)

4. Pg. 306 in the hardcover. It gutted me. I think I snarled out loud. No spoilers here, but you’ll know it when you get to it. I AM NOT OVER IT YET.

5. The book design. Yeah, it’s totally shallow to end with this, but this book is so pretty. The blazing autumn leaves against those shades of turquoise and teal! The depiction of the twins as a reflection. Those boots (I want both pairs, please). The text dividers that change depending on which twin is narrating. I am making heart-eyes at this book.

. . . Dang it, now I’m out of numbers and I didn’t even touch on the Jewish representation! The voices are authentic and the religious details are skillfully woven into the narrative. ❤

And that’s that! Next time I’m bringing the fluff.

“5 Things I Love About…” is a blog series about what makes some of my recent reads stand out. While I do my best to avoid major spoilers, some of the details I list could be considered minor spoilers.

Confession time: While I’ve owned The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas for months and months, I only just got around to reading it. This is YA sacrilege. I knowwwww. 2017 was a crappy year, and I wasn’t emotionally up for heavier reads like THUG.

BUT Y’ALL, I HAVE RECTIFIED THIS ISSUE AND I AM SO GLAD I DID. This book is so incredibly powerful. In case you’ve been even more out of touch than me, THUG is told from the POV of sixteen-year-old Starr, who’s the only witness when her childhood friend is shot and killed by a police officer. What follows is one of the most stunning and relevant and necessary stories I’ve read in a long time. Starr is fierce and vulnerable and so well-rendered, and . . . ARGH YES JUST READ IT.

Five things I love:

1. THUG is one of those brilliant, wrenching YA titles that can hook non-YA readers. My best friend doesn’t read YA fiction beyond Harry Potter and had never heard of THUG, but I left her alone with my copy for a short time last week. When I got back, she stared at me with owl eyes. “That chapter!” she said. “THAT FIRST CHAPTER.” Since then, we’ve been passing the book back and forth. She’s impatiently waiting for me to finish writing this post so she can have it back, and I’ve had to hold back from texting her quotes and spoilers and “OMG WAIT UNTIL YOU GET TO THIS PART” messages every ten pages. Oh, and speaking of that first chapter . . .

2. The way my heart crashed at the end of chapter one. I knew what was coming from reading blurbs and reviews, but the story leads up to that moment with such intensity that I went into full-blown denial. Read it and tell me you don’t feel that same dread, that same inevitability. Tell me you don’t start to sink.

3. Garden Heights Starr vs. Williamson Starr. Angie Thomas juggles Starr’s neighborhood vs. school personas so skillfully that the narrative slips between them almost imperceptibly at times.

4. Starr’s dad, Big Mav. There’s so much to adore about Maverick’s complexity and wisdom and I don’t want to give too much away, so I’ll go with a few of my favorite tiny details — his gardening and the way he refers to Starr’s Macbook laptop as “that expensive-ass fruit one.” I use a Macbook too, and . . . Yeah, that sums it up pretty well.

5. Starr’s knowledge of sneakers. What a unique character detail. She can ID them, she knows how to maintain them, and she’ll probably judge you for the ones on your feet. She usually goes for Jordans, but she wears silver sequined Chucks to prom, and . . .

I might be just a little bit biased about sequined Chuck Taylors. These are mine.

There’s so much to digest in THUG. So much to fall in love with and so much to rage against right along with Starr. And now I need to hand my copy back to my friend. She’s waiting. And staring.