April 15, 2025 by Holiday House
E ARC provided by Edelweiss Plus
To celebrate their grandmother and grandfather's fiftieth wedding anniversary in 2019, Alice's family comes from Seattle to Homestead, Minnesota. Alice and her cousin, Bethany, haven't seen each other for seven years; forever, when one is twelve. They know that something occurred to make their mothers, Caroline and Elizabeth, stop speaking, but they can't find out why. The families are very different, and the tension is immediate. Alice, whose mother is an OB GYN and whose father's sister is married to a woman and having a baby through artificial insemination, has green hair and plays roller derby. Bethany, whose mother helps her parents run the local gas station and diner, and whose father has moved to Minneapolis after the divorce, tries to follow her family's strict Missouri Synod Lutheran church teachings while secretly reading books with LGBTQIA+ characters. Alice and Bee (a name Bethany likes more than the one she shares with her grandmother) hit it off, but their mothers fight once again. Alice returns to Seattle, but the cousins text. They make plans to have Bee visit with her grandmother in the summer, but then the COVID pandemic hits, and this makes the trip impossible for several very sad reasons. The racial justice protests following the George Floyd murder complicate dynamics as well. The cousins manage to figure out the family dynamics, and Bee is glad of her cousin's support when she comes out as gay, which doesn't go over well with her Minnesota family.
There are a lot of issues to unpack in this book. It's a very interesting look at the COVID pandemic, and I appreciated that it happened after the book was well underway, so it was easy to see how the changes impacted the characters. It was nice to see the cousins reconnect after so many years. The reason why the sisters stopped speaking seemed unreasonable to me, but I also understand that sometimes family doesn't get along, and there is no way to get past philosophical disagreements; a significant portion of my family is Missouri Synod Lutheran while I am not, and sometimes you have to not have certain discussions. While this book was suitable for middle school, it had a young adult level of angst and plot.
In the E ARC, there were a lot of odd symbols in place of words, arrows and such. There was no note that I could find anywhere explaining these, and it was rather annoying. I'd love to know what these were; I'm sure I'm missing something because I didn't understand them.
April 8, 2025 by Feiwel & Friends
E ARC provided by Edelweiss Plus
Olive (who ONLY wants to be called Ollie, thank you very much) is having a hard time in middle school. Friendships with both Calliope (Cal) and Nate are hard, because Ollie doesn't get excited about fashion or crushes on boys enough for Cal and her new friend Nora, and Nate's friends are giving him a hard time about the fact that Ollie plays hockey with them. Things are difficult at home as well; Ollie's mother, who moved to the US from Iran, married Ollie's father, and didn't have contact with her family, has died, and Ollie and her older sister Lila are trying to get by. After a sex Ed assignment to discuss what it means to be a woman, Ollie, who already is having trouble accepting the changes that puberty brings, struggles even more with identity and social preconceptions. When Dina discusses some of the issues that come up in class and invites Ollie to join a Queer Book Club, this helps, as does reading books like Gino's Melissa. Of course, parents in the school complain about the book club, and even about sex ed class and the fact that gender identities are even discussed. Eventually, Ollie gets a haircut and informs Dad and grandparents about the new identity being adopted, and even though there are some problems, progress is made.
The author's notes says that this story was inspired in part by Blume's Are You There God, It's Me Margaret, and that makes sense. This is much more like Gino's Melissa, Hennessey's The Other Boy, or Polonsky's Gracefully Grayson in that it is more about realizing and working to accept a gender identity than anything else. There is the sub plot about Ollie dealing with the mother's death, but there isn't much in the book that stands out, other than Ollie's realization of identity. It seemed odd that a school would have a sex ed class that was divided by gender; my school has not had a dedicated sex ed class since I started in 2002, and the units in science and health are certainly delivered to everyone. Even though the teacher is older, it seemed unusual that she would assign the sorts of projects that she did. I'd like to see more books like Bunker's Zenobia July and Gephart's Lily and Dunkin where gender identity is just part of a character's story, and not the entire focus of the book, but this will be a big hit with readers who enjoyed Lukoff's Different Kinds of Fruit, Sass' Ellen Between the Lines, Palmer's Camp Prodigy, and Riley's Jude Saves the World.
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