Pasadena Public Library
Review by Jasmine Sov, 14 Frankly In Love By David Yoon Frankly in Love is a story from the perspective of Frank Li, Korean-American high school senior whose parents are very, very traditional as in “go to Harvard for college and marry a nice Korean girl” traditional. In fact, when […]
Review by Genevieve Ruth Harvey, 16 The Astonishing Color of After By Emily X. R. Pan In The Astonishing Color of After, X. R. Pan crafts a story using nonconventional colors, such as fuchsia and alizarin crimson, to indicate the complex emotions Leigh is dealing with following her mother’s death. Leigh, […]
Review by Jasmine Sov, 14 Bone Crier’s Moon tells the story of Ailesse and Sabine, two young girls who must one day complete their rite of passage—summoning and sacrificing their destined true love—in order to become true Bone Criers, ferries of the dead. Ailesse is the daughter of her famille’s […]
Review by Genevieve Ruth Harvey, 16 Butterfly Yellow By Thanhha Lai The lacuna that separates Hang from the Texans is evident in the first chapter as she munches on ginger, isolating herself on the boat from others around her, desperately attempting to suppress the memories of her experiences at sea in the […]
Review by Jasmine Sov, 14 Yes No Maybe So By Becky Albertalli and Aisha Saeed When Jamie, who considers himself to be awful at public speaking, and Maya, who’s going through the worst possible time of her life, somehow end up doing political canvassing for their local state senate candidate, they’re […]
Review by Jasmine Sov, 14 What I Want You To See By Catherine Linka Winning a full-ride scholarship to California’s top art school previously seemed like a crazy, awesome, happily-ever-after for Sabine Reyes, but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. The renowned professor Colin Krell, who she’d hoped to be […]
Review by Nina Dinan, 16 Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything American History Textbooks Get Wrong (Young Readers’ Edition) By James W. Loewen, Adapted by Rebecca Stefoff “In his novel 1984, English writer George Orwell said, ‘Who controls the present controls the past.’ He meant that those in power shape the way […]
Review by Jasmine Sov, 14 Don’t Read Comments By Eric Smith Divya Sharma, a popular teenage streaming gamer known as D1V, seems like she’s got it all—a host of fans, companies tripping over themselves to be her sponsor, and a huge, established presence in this year’s hottest game, “Reclaim the Sun”. […]
Review by Nina Dinan, 16 Ordinary Hazards: A Memoir By Nikki Grimes Ordinary Hazards is a memoir in verse. As the daughter of a paranoid schizophrenic mother and a struggling violinist father, Nikki Grimes spent her early years in and out of foster care, contending not only with poverty but with an […]
Review by Nina Dinan, 16 Shout: The True Story of a Survivor Who Refused to be Silenced By Laurie Halse Anderson In the poem “emergency, in three acts”, Laurie Halse Anderson recounts her experience giving a speech at a New Jersey high school. In this scene, she “stands in the spotlight […]